A New Approach to Exploring the Relationship between Weather Phenomenon and Truck Traffic Volume in the Cold Region Highway Network

Abstract

Weather events are arbitrary, and this makes it difficult to incorporate weather parameters into transportation models. Recent research on traffic weather interaction analysis conducted at the University of Regina, Canada reported traffic variations with cold temperatures and snowfall. The research team at the University of Regina proposed a linear association between snowfall and temperature to analyze the traffic variation on provincial highways during winter months. The variations were studies with the inclusion of the expected daily volume factor as an independent variable in the model structure. However, the study did not analyze the nature of the association between daily truck traffic volume and snowfall. Based on these drawbacks of the past studies, in this research, the objective is to focus on the effects of snow and temperature on traffic volume changes with a methodological help of Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC), which stems from the maximal information-based nonparametric exploration (MINE) statistics. The results obtained from the analysis indicate that the relationship between snow and truck traffic is non-linear. However, the study could not establish any functional relationship between snowfall and daily truck volume. It is desired to further conduct an hourly analysis to explore a new relationship between snowfall and truck volume.