A STUDY ON IMPROVING THE ACCURACY OF DATA FROM ULTRASONIC VEHICLE DETECTORS IN A TRAFFIC CONTROL COLLECTION SYSTEM

Recently, along with the growth of the market for road traffic information-providing media, the accuracy of traffic data collected at each point along roads, the source of information provided, has increased in importance. The Traffic Control Collecting System on the Metropolitan Expressway collects data from numerous vehicle detectors installed along roads which generate basic traffic data, including quantity of vehicles, travel speed, and degree of congestion. When planning to construct a road, the effective control of traffic flow to relieve congestion using an analysis of traffic flow on the road network such as an O-D analysis, has increased in importance and requires a high level of vehicle detector count accuracy. However, vehicles that weave on diverging, merging, or channeling points, decrease the accuracy of ultrasonic vehicle detector counts. It is therefore necessary that the counting accuracy of detectors should be improved. This paper reports on a proposition for a new method of vehicle detection counting, which includes the numbers of diagonally running vehicles. Investigations regarding ultrasonic vehicle detector accuracy have shown that the counting accuracy of the detectors on a straight section is sufficient, but on weaving sections they are not sufficient. Thus, a new method (Qe method), that can also count diagonally driving vehicles, has been adopted. Verification, carried out at about 20 points, indicated that the count accuracy has been improved and the number of points where traffic count errors are within 5% has increased 50% to 96%. It has been thus certified that the Qe method has improved the accuracy of traffic counts from ultrasonic vehicle detectors.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Full conference proceedings available only on CD.
• Corporate Authors:

  ITS America

  1100 17th Street, NW, 12th Floor
  Washington, DC  United States  20036
• Authors:
  • Yano, D
  • Terauchi, T
  • Hirao, H
  • Nomura, K
  • Ohe, I
  • Yamashita, T
• Conference:
  • Intelligent Transportation: Realizing the Future. Abstracts of the Third World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems
  • Location: Orlando, Florida
  • Date: 1996-10-14 to 1996-10-18
• Publication Date: 1996

Language

• English

Media Info

• Pagination: n.p.

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accuracy; Data collection; Driver information systems; Traffic congestion; Traffic control; Traffic counts; Traffic flow; Ultrasonics; Vehicle detectors
• Uncontrolled Terms: Data sources
• Old TRIS Terms: Diagonally running vehicles; Traffic control systems
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; I73: Traffic Control;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00741690
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Sep 30 1997 12:00AM