Microscopic Simulation-Based High Occupancy Vehicle Lane Safety and Operation Assessment: A Case Study

This study proposes two general alternative designs to enhance the operation and safety of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes at junctions with bus terminals or parking lots. A series of analysis tools, including microscopic simulation, video-based vehicle tracking technique, and Surrogate Safety As...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chao Li, Mohammad Karimi, Ciprian Alecsandru
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2018-01-01
Series:Journal of Advanced Transportation
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2018/5262514
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Summary:This study proposes two general alternative designs to enhance the operation and safety of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes at junctions with bus terminals or parking lots. A series of analysis tools, including microscopic simulation, video-based vehicle tracking technique, and Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM), are applied to model and test the safety and operational efficiency of an HOV road segment near a bus terminal in Québec as a case study. A metaheuristic optimization algorithm (i.e., Whale Optimization Algorithm) is employed to calibrate the microscopic model while deviation from the observed headway distribution is considered as a cost function. The results indicate that this type of HOV configurations exhibits significant safety problems (high number of crossing conflicts) and operational issues (high value of total delay) due to the terminal-bound buses that frequently need to travel across the main road. It is shown that the proposed alternative geometry design efficiently ameliorates the traffic conflicts issues. In addition, the alternative control design scheme significantly reduces the public transit delay. It is expected that this methodology can be applied to other reserved lane configurations similar to the investigated case study.
ISSN:0197-6729
2042-3195