Lane Capacity Estimation and Level of Service Evaluation for Freeway Toll Plazas Based on Transaction Data

Lane capacity is an important indicator to reveal operation characteristics of toll plazas. The research is conducted with a case study in Anhui, China. Study periods are classified into weekdays, weekends and statutory holidays. Inter-vehicle time refers to the time difference of two consecutive departure times of vehicles at the toll plaza. Based on toll transaction data, the authors studied inter-vehicle time distributions of all lanes and developed a statistical method to estimate saturation inter-vehicle times. Thus, lane capacity can be calculated by the inverse of saturation inter-vehicle time. Passenger-car Equivalents (PCE) are proposed to analyze trucks and cars in a unified framework. The authors classified vehicle pairs into Car-Car (C-C), Car-Truck (C-T), Truck-Car (T-C) and Truck-Truck (T-T), and the PCE of C-T, T-C and T-T are calculated by dividing their saturation inter-vehicle times by the saturation inter-vehicle time of C-C. Furthermore, the authors evaluated the level of service (LOS) of toll lanes with Volume-to-Capacity (V/C) ratios and average queue length. Based on LOS results, the authors can further give recommendations to save operation costs and optimize space utilization of the toll plaza area. For the studied toll plaza, the V/C ratio of one of the two Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) lanes is not larger than 0.02 during all studied periods, which indicates that one ETC lane could satisfy the current upstream arrival demand. Thus, reducing a ETC lane helps to save costs in the short term. However, increasing the proportion of vehicles using ETC system may be recommended in the long run.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE25 Standing Committee on Congestion Pricing.
• Authors:
  • Liu, Xinyu
  • Yun, Meiping
  • Yang, Xiaoguang
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 13p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automated toll collection; Case studies; Freeways; Highway capacity; Level of service; Toll plazas; Traffic flow; Traffic lanes; Traffic queuing; Traffic volume
• Geographic Terms: Anhui (China)
• Subject Areas: Finance; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01659599
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-05380
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 8 2018 9:41AM