Abstract

With increase in population and vehicular density in urban areas in developing countries, urban roads present a dismay picture with roads not being able to cater to the capacity for which they are designed for. This situation not only leads to huge economic wastage, but also endangers safety of road users. Increase in vehicular population along with shortage of urban road space is manifested in the form of road side frictions. Side friction factors are defined as those activities which take place on the sides of carriage ways or even on the carriage ways that are likely to affect the normal traffic flowing through the carriage ways. Friction factors are observed to affect the normal traffic adversely in the heterogeneous traffic condition in developing countries like India much severely than the roads catering homogeneous traffic. In general, side frictions can be in the form of buses stopped at bus stops, pedestrians walking along the sides of carriage ways and crossing at random, on-street parking, exits and entries from approach roads, slow moving vehicles etc. The present study conducted on four lane divided urban roads considering the most commonly observed forms of side frictions on Indian roads like buses stopped on curb side bus stops, pedestrians walking along carriage ways, on-street parking and a combination of all these factors was done to quantitatively assess the impact of these on traffic characteristics of flow on the roads. Analysis was conducted to determine the speed reduction and capacity deterioration observed on such stretches and speed prediction models were modelled with the above friction parameters as independent variables for each category of side friction.

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