An Investigation of the Operation of the Metering System at the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge (SFOBB)
The westbound direction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (SFOBB) is one of the most heavily travelled tolled freeway facilities in the nation. A metering system is used to maintain the entering flow at capacity on the bridge and facilitate the merging of 20 traffic lanes at the toll plaza into five travel lanes on the bridge. This paper presents an assessment of the operating performance of the SFOBB and its metering system based on an analysis of the database of loop detector data, video recording, tollbooth counts, and metering logs. There are active bottlenecks that reduce the throughput on the bridge. A number of weaknesses are observed in the current metering strategy. Proposals are formulated to improve the operating conditions at the bridge including re-arrangement of travel lanes for different vehicle types at the toll plaza, and advanced control ramp metering algorithms.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB20 Standing Committee on Freeway Operations.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Amini, Zahra
- Skabardonis, Alexander
- Varaiya, Pravin
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2016-1-10 to 2016-1-14
- Date: 2016
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; Maps; References;
- Pagination: 17p
- Monograph Title: TRB 95th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Bottlenecks; Evaluation and assessment; Loop detectors; Ramp metering; Traffic lanes; Video
- Identifier Terms: San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge
- Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01594084
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 16-5518
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Mar 21 2016 4:40PM