Queue and user’s costs in highway work zones

The IDOT Bureau of Design and Environment (BDE) Manual requires that traffic control plans for freeway reconstruction projects include a queuing analysis to determine the anticipated traffic backups in work zones. Queue length and delay calculations rely on the estimation of capacity and operating speed. In this study, field data were collected from five work zones in Illinois. Thirteen data sets were extracted from the field data. Each data set represents a particular traffic condition at a given site. A work zone capacity value was suggested for each traffic condition based on the field data. Each of these models can be adjusted to non-ideal conditions. Methods to estimate the length of moving queue, delay and users’ cost were developed to handle the cases where a demand higher than capacity causes queue. The queue length and delay were estimated for all the data sets using the proposed method. The results also were compared with the QuickZone 2 outputs. When the arrival volume in an interval was less than the capacity of the interval, the QuickZone2 did not yield any delay or queue length even though there was congestion and delay in a part of the interval.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Pagination: 117p + appendices

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01380671
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Source Agency: ARRB
  • Report/Paper Numbers: ICT-10-075
  • Files: ATRI, STATEDOT
  • Created Date: Aug 22 2012 11:06AM