Traffic Causality Analysis for Robust Road Freight

Details

• Creators:
  Krumm, John ; Shahabi, Cyrus
• Corporate Creators:
  METRANS Transportation Center (Calif.) ; Pacific Southwest Region 9 UTC, University of Southern California
• Corporate Contributors:
  United States. Department of Transportation. University Transportation Centers (UTC) Program ; United States. Department of Transportation. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  Freight Traffic Location Traffic Characteristics Traffic Congestion
• Publication/ Report Number:
  PSR-23-06 TO 076
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  Los Angeles (California);United States
• Edition:
  Final report (4/2/2024 – 12/31/2024)
• Corporate Publisher:
  Pacific Southwest Region 9 UTC, University of Southern California
• Abstract:
  Road traffic congestion is a persistent problem. Focusing resources on the causes of congestion is a potentially efficient strategy for reducing slowdowns. We present an algorithm to discover which parts of the Los Angeles highway system tend to cause slowdowns on other parts of the highway. We use time series of road speeds as inputs to our causal discovery algorithm. Finding other algorithms inadequate, we develop a new approach that is novel in two ways. First, it concentrates on just the presence or absence of events in the time series, where an event indicates the temporal beginning of a traffic slowdown. Second, we train a binary classifier to identify pairs of cause/effect locations using pairs of road locations where we are reasonably certain a priori of their causal connections, both positive and negative. We test our approach on six months of road speed data from 195 different highway speed sensors in the Los Angeles area, showing that our approach is superior to state-of-the-art baselines. We include an analysis of parts of the highway that are especially subject to slowdowns for freight traffic.
• Format:
  PDF
• Funding:
  69A3551747109, Caltrans 65A0674
• Collection(s):
  University Transportation Centers
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:0fbd0d0646a098f93356ae1a5d2727d2641c7bdbab917de01217b778e5fdf5a239475f4a0f107647184c08a36989053d68a1d3ce1de99a16e9a600704c2d5c85
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/83168/dot_83168_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.83 MB ]