Testing Daganzo's Behavioral Theory for Multi-lane Freeway Traffic

Koohong Chung and Michael Cassidy

Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley

Abstract: This report describes the detailed, albeit still preliminary study of traffic on stretches of two different freeways. Both were plagued by merge bottlenecks. The first of these sites is the Gardiner Expressway, a 3.3 km long freeway stretch in Toronto, Canada. The site was selected because of its suitable geometry (i.e. its merge bottleneck) and its well-tuned loop detectors located upstream and downstream of the bottleneck. The site thus provided for an exceptionally good “laboratory” for testing Daganzo’s behavior theory of drivers (Daganzo, 1999). It turns out that the observations from this stretch qualitatively match the theory in a number of important ways, as will be described in this report. The second site is a 1.8 km stretch of westbound Interstate 24 just upstream of the Caldecott Tunnel in Berkeley, California. This site provided a means for verifying Daganzo’s theory for “California conditions.” It is especially suitable for this study thanks to its very disruptive bottleneck and to its numerous vantage points (i.e., adjacent hillsides) from which to videotape traffic. Four cameras were strategically deployed along this freeway stretch. The detailed traffic data (manually) extracted from these videos were, like the Toronto data, found to be qualitatively consistent with much of Daganzo’s theory.

Keywords: Engineering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-11-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/4dt1k17h.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt4dt1k17h

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().