Modeling Network Impact in Area Surrounding Activity Center Caused by Special Events

Abstract

Although many traffic prediction models have been studied, much of the existing research considers traffic congestion primarily caused by construction and incidents. An effort to assess the impact of special events (ballgames, parades, conventions, etc.) in an urban area is needed. In this paper, a prototype model for traffic analysis under special events is proposed and tested. Unlike hydrodynamic modeling or the conventional microscopic approach by vehicle tracking, this model tries to decompose the overall system impact into the spatial effect of the special event network (SE network) and the temporal effect of the eventgenerated traffic. The model formulation is shown to possess a unique, physically meaningful solution to the underlying engineering problem. Using systemwide field data for model calibration, preliminary tests have shown encouraging results in predicting traffic impact on SE networks. Although further testing and improvement is needed, the proposed modeling approach has demonstrated its potential for extending to other applications such as disaster evacuation planning.

Parking Planning With Route Assignment for Planned Special Events

“…Group A assumes that the traffic manager tries to avoid conflict points at some intersections (i.e., T10 or T14) because, for example, manual control may be difficult at these locations. Group B recognizes that traffic operations in the outbound phase are more concentrated in time than in the inbound phase ( 15 ), leading to a higher likelihood of collisions. Group C defines higher weights for V-P conflicts since pedestrians are more likely to be injured than in-vehicle drivers or passengers in a collision ( 45 , 46 ).…”

“…In the local area, parking lots within walking distance of the venue are utilized. Event attendees tend to enter and leave the local area in concentrated periods before and after the event ( 15 ). The complete traffic operation process in the local area on the day of the event is divided into the following three phases:…”

Anisotropic Mesoscopic traffic Simulation approach to support large-scale traffic and logistic modeling and analysis

“…Most of the existing approaches are so-called microscopic simulation in which complex driving behaviors such as car following and lane-changing are explicitly modeling in second or sub-second time resolution. The research developments related to microscopic traffic simulation models can be generally classified into theoretical development (Ferreira et al 2009;Kerner et al 2006;Burghout et al 2005), model calibration and validation (Simith et al 2006;Park et al 2006;Ozbay et al 2006) , and integrated applications (Yin et al 2007;Shelton 2008;Zhang et al 2010).…”

Extension of Activity-Based Modeling Approach to Incorporate Supply Side of Activities

“…In the case of special events, efforts have been made to understand their impact on transit ridership and traffic management (4)(5)(6)(7)(8). Sometimes special events are modeled in the context of special generator modeling (9).…”