Analysis of Congestion Using Advanced Traffic Instruments – a Case Study of Chandigarh, India | Original Article

ABSTRACT:

In present scenario, transportation network provides the way for movements and medium for reaching destinations. It is the backbone of urban activity undergoing in cities.Inadequate transportation system hampers economic activities and creates hindrances for development. In most of the developing countries like India, obsolete methods like manual counting and stopwatch methods are being used for traffic related studies. Presently, there are more advanced and reliable traffic instruments like Metro Count, Radar Gun etc. available which can collect vast road usage information and can give large traffic data output in comparatively less time. These advanced methods are being used extensively in developed countries, but very few studies are available which shows use of these instruments in India. This paper presents amethodology to study the traffic flow characteristics and to analyse congestion on major roads (V-2 roads) of Chandigarh City using such advanced instruments. Traffic in Chandigarh has been increasing at much higher pace in tune with the vastly increasing commercial, industrial and manufacturing needs. Thus, with the help of advanced traffic survey instruments like Metro Count and Radar Gun, volume and speed study has been carried out to estimate congestion at various points on major roads of Chandigarh and Level of Service (LOS) was also determined for the same roads. The speed study has also been done using both Metro Count as well as Radar Gun for its comparative analysis. The findings of this study have revealed heavy congestion on approximately all the roads with Volume Capacity (VC) ratio less than one but as traffic is increasing, they may approach their saturation point soon. LOS has been found out to be either ‘C’ or ‘D’ indicating stable flow conditions for now but small increase may cause a considerable reduction in the ‘performance’ or ‘service’ which demand efforts to be taken to maintain the existing performance. The speed study has shown that roads are not satisfying the present prescribed speed limits arising the need to either revise speed limits or to adopt remedial measures to lower the speed of moving traffic within speed limits. It has been observed that Metro Count and Radar Gun give more reliable and accurate data and results as compared to other conventional methods available. Therefore, the authors propose to use such instruments only in order to carry out different traffic studies.