Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Assessing Mobility and Safety Impacts of a Variable Speed Limit Control Strategy

Assessing Mobility and Safety Impacts of a Variable Speed Limit Control Strategy With the recent advances in active transportation and demand management, variable speed limits (VSLs) have been identified as an active traffic management strategy for improving freeway mobility and safety. Several heuristic VSL strategies have been proposed and evaluated. This paper proposes a model predictive VSL control strategy and evaluates its safety and mobility impacts. The strategy uses second-order traffic flow models to predict the traffic state and to provide a speed for optimizing corridor operational performance. A sensitivity analysis of the VSL update frequency and the safety constraints for the VSL strategy was performed to determine the best scenario in terms of safety and mobility. A stretch of Whitemud Drive, an urban freeway corridor in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, was selected as the study area. The proposed VSL strategy was implemented in the microsimulation platform with a special software module. A real-time collision prediction model was developed for the same study area by using a matched case-control logistic regression technique to estimate the collision probability for each scenario. The results indicated that the proposed VSL control strategy can improve safety by approximately 50% and mobility by approximately 30%. A VSL update frequency of 5 min and a maximum speed difference of 10 km/h between successive time steps yielded the best performances. This finding can be useful for field implementation of VSL control. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Transportation Research Record SAGE

Assessing Mobility and Safety Impacts of a Variable Speed Limit Control Strategy

Download PDF
11 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/assessing-mobility-and-safety-impacts-of-a-variable-speed-limit-jeZwbjhQ0B

References (27)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© 2013 National Academy of Sciences
ISSN
0361-1981
eISSN
2169-4052
DOI
10.3141/2364-01
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

With the recent advances in active transportation and demand management, variable speed limits (VSLs) have been identified as an active traffic management strategy for improving freeway mobility and safety. Several heuristic VSL strategies have been proposed and evaluated. This paper proposes a model predictive VSL control strategy and evaluates its safety and mobility impacts. The strategy uses second-order traffic flow models to predict the traffic state and to provide a speed for optimizing corridor operational performance. A sensitivity analysis of the VSL update frequency and the safety constraints for the VSL strategy was performed to determine the best scenario in terms of safety and mobility. A stretch of Whitemud Drive, an urban freeway corridor in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, was selected as the study area. The proposed VSL strategy was implemented in the microsimulation platform with a special software module. A real-time collision prediction model was developed for the same study area by using a matched case-control logistic regression technique to estimate the collision probability for each scenario. The results indicated that the proposed VSL control strategy can improve safety by approximately 50% and mobility by approximately 30%. A VSL update frequency of 5 min and a maximum speed difference of 10 km/h between successive time steps yielded the best performances. This finding can be useful for field implementation of VSL control.

Journal

Transportation Research Record – SAGE

Published: Jan 1, 2013

There are no references for this article.