An evaluation framework for traffic calming measures in residential areas

Abstract

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of various traffic calming measures from the perspectives of traffic performance and safety, and environmental and public health impacts. The proposed framework was applied to four calming measures – two types of speed humps, speed tables, and chicanes – to demonstrate its usefulness and applicability. A field experiment using probe vehicles equipped with global positioning system devices was conducted to obtain vehicle trajectory data for use in more realistic simulations. In addition, a recently developed vehicle emissions model was used for more accurate evaluation of environmental and public health impacts. The results show that chicane is better than the other types of traffic calming measures considered, except in terms of vehicle emissions.