Assessing travel time reliability implications due to roadworks on private vehicles and public transport services in urban road networks

Abstract

Abstract Roadworks are perhaps the most controversial topic in transport professional field. On one hand, they are a necessity to assure the current and future functionality of the traffic network, while on the other, they are seen as a major disturbance by road users with concerns for excessive travel time delays. The impact of roadworks is usually analysed at a local level however the network-wide effects are crucial to ensure reliable travel times. Moreover the analysis usually focusses on private cars and the reliability impact on public transport services are too important to ignore. This paper investigates the impact of roadworks undertaken on a given road link over wider parts of the network and assesses travel time reliability for both cars and buses. This research involves setting up of a conventional network assignment model to arrive at the route choice of drivers as a result of the roadworks and then integrates the outcomes with a microsimulation model to generate space-time trajectories to arrive at travel times of individual vehicles. We adopted a reliability measure from the literature to compute travel time reliability of a given type of vehicle by unique origin-destination (O-D) pair combinations and also more generally to provide a wider picture at an aggregated network level. The method was tested on a real life network in England, and travel time reliability results were analysed both at the network scale and significant O-D pair level for private cars and bus routes.