Economic Evaluation of Traffic Congestion at Intersection: Case study from an Indian City

Abstract

Traffic congestion causes negative impacts to transport sector and cause a massive increase in the transportation cost. Congestion cost evaluation helps wider aspects of the policy and planning and thus by providing potential solutions to the traffic congestion problem. This study evaluates the traffic congestion cost at signalized intersections located in the state of Kerala, India which prevail heterogeneous traffic conditions. Congestion cost estimations are done by considering the factors including delay, traffic volume, passenger occupancy, and value of travel time of different vehicle types. The annual congestion cost of traffic congestion at each approach of signalized intersections is quantified. The mode share of the present study reveals that private vehicles such as two wheeler and car constitute an average share of 75% of total traffic and which has the maximum share of traffic compared to public vehicles. Therefore, this study considers a candid relief measure proposal as mode shift to public transport from private vehicles. The result shows that marginal change in the two wheeler shift to public transport in Indian city reduce the congestion cost by 38% and thus can promote usage of public transport in the Indian cities to reduce congestion.