Urban Traffic Flow Mapping of an Andean Capital: Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

Several efforts have been devoted to developing sustainable cities to address global environmental challenges and the growth of urban areas. In particular, transportation has various issues such as air pollution, noise, and traffic, which have to be addressed by collecting significant information of the traffic and road conditions of the cities. Automating the data extraction process and street network construction will allow building more useful models to study traffic behavior. This work presents a network modeling approach to identify interest points (extreme and internal) of the city, through a winner-takes-all edge trimming, and mapping the traffic flow between them. Such points can be considered as entries of an Origin-Destination matrix, where such information can be used to model traffic behavior between interest points. The case study of Quito, Ecuador is considered. Besides, to address environmental issues, this paper encourages the replacement of internal combustion taxis with electric vehicles. From the understanding of the vehicle traffic behavior, a pre-feasibility siting of electric taxi (ET) charging stations was carried out. The results will allow performing the sizing of each charging station considering electric power network constraints. This work aims to ensure a sustainable transportation system based on this crucial information. INDEX TERMS charging station, driving time and distance, electric vehicle, graph trimming, urban traffic network

A charging station planning model considering electric bus aggregators

“…To demonstrate the performance of this methodology for an EB aggregator, the case study of the electric grid of Quito, Ecuador, according to the to the commitment of the Quito City Hall to incorporate EBs into the bus network [44]. The electricity is supplied by Empresa Eléctrica Quito (EEQ), which is Quito public electric distribution company.…”

Optimal siting and sizing of electric taxi charging stations considering transportation and power system requirements

“…The urban traffic flow mapping in Quito was completed in a previous study [40]; numerous prospective ET charging stations were chosen.…”

“…Once the city street network substrate has been defined, traffic flow information must be obtained. The Google Distance Matrix API was used to extract real-time traffic data from one vertex v i to its connected neighbors in the street network [40]. The Google Distance Matrix API provides the travel distance and time based on the recommended driving route e k between two vertices e k = (n i , n j ).…”

Coordinated Siting and Sizing of Electric Taxi Charging Stations Considering Traffic and Power Systems Conditions

“…In the previous work [22], the urban traffic flow mapping of Quito was performed, and various potential candidates for ET charging stations were selected. For this work, 10 candidate places are selected based on their minimum average time.…”