A Ramp All the Way
I was grooving on this almost Ed Ruscha-style illustration (“27 Onramp Configurations”?) in a new paper from David Levinson and Lei Zhang, “Ramp Metering and Freeway Bottleneck Capacity,” in Transportation Research: A Policy and Practice 44(4), May 2010, Pages 218-235.
The findings were sanguine on ramp metering:
Traffic flow characteristics at twenty-seven active freeway bottlenecks in the Twin Cities are studied for seven weeks without ramp metering and seven weeks with ramp metering. A series of hypotheses regarding the relationship between ramp metering and the capacity of active bottlenecks are developed and tested against empirical traffic data. The results demonstrate with strong evidence that ramp metering can increase bottleneck capacity. It achieves that by:
(1) postponing and sometimes eliminating bottleneck activation – the average duration of the pre-queue transition period across all studied bottlenecks is 73 percent longer with ramp metering than without;
(2) accommodating higher flows during the pre-queue transition period than without metering – the average flow rate during the transition period is 2 percent higher with metering than without (with a 2% standard deviation);
(3) and increasing queue discharge flow rates after breakdown – the average queue discharge flow rate is 3 percent higher with metering than without (with a 3% standard deviation).
Therefore, ramp meters can reduce freeway delays through not only increased capacity at segments upstream of bottlenecks (type I capacity increase), but also increased capacity at bottlenecks themselves (type II capacity increase). Previously, ramp metering is considered to be effective only when freeway traffic is successfully restricted in uncongested states. The existence of type II capacity increase suggests there are benefits to meter entrance ramps even after breakdown has occurred. This study focuses on the impacts of ramp metering on freeway bottleneck capacity. The causes of such impacts should be more thoroughly examined by future studies, so that the findings can provide more guidance to the development of ramp control strategies. It should also be noted that both types of capacity increases on the freeway mainline are at the expense of degraded conditions at the on-ramps and possibly arterial network. Therefore, without more comprehensive system-wide analysis, the findings of this paper, though in favor of ramp metering, do not necessarily justify its deployment.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 7:39 am and is filed under Cars, Cities, Commuting, Congestion, Traffic Engineering, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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