United States Department of Transportation
i
Using Probe Vehicle Data to Understand Bottlenecks and Congestion
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2014-09-24
[PDF-1.47 MB]
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TRIS Online Accession Number:01544551
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Abstract:Point bottleneck models are widely used and are well established in traffic flow theory. Contrary to such conventional wisdom, in this report the authors present evidence that modeling the bottleneck mechanism as if it occurs at a single point along the road is too simplistic and they show that the mechanism appears to occur over an extended distance for some bottlenecks. The present work highlights additional features that are obscured by the single point assumption. The term "apparent-point-bottleneck", APB, is adopted to specify the location where one would place the point bottleneck model while underscoring the belief that the actual bottleneck mechanism occurs over an extended distance. Many earlier works have studied traffic evolution in the queue, upstream of freeway bottlenecks using loop detectors, film/video, etc. Few of these studies consider conditions downstream of the APB beyond looking for free flow conditions to ensure that the bottleneck is active. In this study the authors take the opposite approach and focus almost entirely on traffic downstream of a recurring APB that arises from a lane drop. Like earlier studies they employ conventional loop detectors, but then go further and use over a hundred probe vehicle tours through the corridor. The authors find evidence of subtle flow limiting and speed reducing phenomena more than a mile downstream of the APB when the bottleneck is active. As discussed in Section 2, both data sets tell the same story: when the bottleneck is active it takes several miles downstream of the APB before drivers attain full free speed for the given flows.
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