Lane Effect of Traffic Flow Analysis in India

Abstract

The aim of this research is to develop quantitative analysis method for emerging countries, especially focusing on major city in India where they are facing negative impact by transportation such as CO2 emission growth, many traffic fatalities, large fuel consumption, and air pollution as a result. In this research, we installed more than ten traffic monitoring traffic counter cameras in Ahmedabad city of Gujarat state of India. The monitoring cameras detect traffic vehicle and capture several traffic data such as vehicle numbers, vehicle speed, traffic occupancy, vehicle density, gap length between vehicle to vehicle and so on. And each data is collected by every minutes per roads. Therefore the collected data becomes more than 432,000 points per months. In order to analyse the traffic data, author recognize special features of the collected traffic data and the Envelope Observation (EO) for traffic flow characteristics by measurement data is useful for obtaining traffic flow equation. The unique feature of emerging counties traffic data is widely spread plots at the traffic basic characteristics such as traffic density to speed curve and traffic density to traffic volume curve. But there is clearly boundary line in those curves. Author uses EO analysis to fit traffic flow parameters to these boundary lines. By defining traffic flow parameters, it is able to obtain the traffic flow value such as free speed traffic flow, critical traffic volume, and critical traffic density. After obtaining traffic parameters, it is able to create traffic flow equation for each measured road and even each lane of its road. The uniqueness of this research is extension of analysis for the road lane effect for the traffic congestion by correlation ratio analysis between driving lane and passing lane of each road. As the result of this analysis, it becomes clear that congestion condition of roads makes the different traffic flow characteristics by driving and passing lane. This is the first time to explain the lane effect for traffic congestion on the basis of the EO method.