Publication Date: 2024/01/13
Abstract: Numerous measures are being implemented to address transportation challenges in Port Harcourt, a rapidly growing city with a high population in Nigeria. The city experiences heavy traffic congestion, especially on major link roads, leading to significant delays due to the bottlenecks caused by reckless parking, construction work, and other factors. To analyse speed at bottlenecks, experts apply the Lighthill Theory, a rigorous process determining speed. Bottlenecks refer to areas in the road network where traffic flow is hindered, resulting in congestion and decreased speeds. Accurately modelling speed in the presence of bottlenecks is critical to understanding traffic dynamics and developing effective strategies to manage congestion. A study was conducted at 34 locations with bottlenecks caused by various factors, including road construction, merging lanes, road capacity limitations, accidents, and vehicle breakdowns. Using Eureqa software, the project developed models that can easily calculate the speed at bottlenecks. The maximum error in predicting speeds before, at, and after the bottleneck is 0.288, 0.241, and 4.235, respectively. The mean squared error of speeds before, at, and after the bottleneck is 0.01048, 0.00908, and 0.858, respectively. These results demonstrate that the models are relatively accurate in predicting speeds at different stages of bottlenecks. The speed models gave R2 values of 0.99125, 0.9977, and 0.97524 for speed before, at, and after the bottleneck, respectively, with a correlation coefficient value (r) of 0.99563, 0.99887, and 0.9883.
Keywords: Model, Congestion, Traffic Flow, Bottleneck, Intersection.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10499914
PDF: https://ijirst.demo4.arinfotech.co/assets/upload/files/IJISRT24JAN213.pdf
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