TransCAD and GIS Technique for Estimating Traffic Demand and Its Application in Gaza City

Abstract

In the early nineties of the last century, the transportation system in Gaza Strip was born and new infrastructure projects, especially road networks, were constructed. However, the construction lacked efficient application of a transportation planning process. Transportation planning relies on traffic demand forecasting process. The conventional process is impeded by extensive amount of socioeconomic data. One of the most widely-used models which mitigate this problem is the TransCAD Model. This model is rarely used in Gaza Strip for traffic demand forecasting, and most of the practices depend mainly on a constant growth rate of traffic. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to apply this model in Gaza City for traffic estimation. This model estimates the origin-destination matrix based on traffic count. The traffic count was carried out at 36 intersections distributed around Gaza City. The results of traffic flow estimation obtained from TransCAD are assigned to the Gaza maps using the GIS techniques for spatial analysis. It is shown that the most congested area at present is the middle of the city especially at Aljala-Omer Almokhtar intersection. Therefore, improvement scenarios of this area should be carried out. The results of calibration of traffic flow estimation show that the differences between the estimated and the actual flows were less than 10%. In addition, network evaluation results show that the network is expected to be more congested in 2015. This work can be used by transportation planners for testing any network improvement scenarios and for studying their network performance.

Promoting Transportation Sustainability by Utilizing Available Roadway Capacity

“…The estimation method implemented in TransCAD 4.7 was chosen to determine an origin/destination matrix from traffic counts by following user equilibrium (UE) assignment. Many computer models have been proposed and applied for O-D matrix estimation to investigate the relationship between traffic counts and O-D matrix, and TransCAD Model is one of the most widely-used models (Almasri & Al-Jazzar, 2013). The O/D Matrix Estimation (ODME) procedure in TransCAD is based on the work of Nielsen, which is an iterative (or bi-level) process that switches back and forth between a traffic assignment stage and a matrix estimation stage, until convergence is reached (Corporation, 2002;Iyer, 2010).…”

Evaluating the Road network in Kut City by using TransCAD and GIS Techniques

“…The only piece of software that completely combines GIS with features for demand modeling and logistics is Trans CAD (Almasri, & Al-Jazzar, 2013) Trans CAD is hence • Traffic Assignment This study made use of the stochastic user equilibrium traffic assignment model found in TransCAD Software 4.5. The road network file and the origin-destination (O-D) matrix file are the two key inputs required by this approach.…”

An Origin-Destination Matrix Estimate for Baghdad City Based on GIS

“…The trip production model = -2.33 -0.174*hh size +0.005*Income/hh + 1.713*Car/hh + 6.417*Exp. Employment Rate (1) Trip Attraction Model = -244.9 +1505.74 * (Employment No./1000)…”

“…Yang et al [19] estimated the congestion O-D matrix by using a user-equilibrium assignment in the form of utilizing a bilevel optimization problem. Almasri and Al-jazzar [1] applied the traffic demand forecasting for the Gaza Strip. In this study, a model to estimate the O-D matrix is developed based on the traffic count.…”