Estimation of Delay and Fuel Loss during Idling of Vehicles at Signalised Intersection in Ahmedabad

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The fuel consumption of the vehicles is increasing day by day as a result of enhanced trip lengths, personal mode of transport and congested intersections. When the vehicles are waiting for their turn to cross the intersection at signals, the drivers normally keep their vehicle's engine on and a result of this extra fuel is consumed. This small amount of fuel wasted aggregated over a number of cycles per day, number of days per year and number of signalized intersections results in a huge quantity of fuel. Measuring delay is important in computing the level of service provided to road users at signalized intersection. Intersection delays may include queue delay and control delay. The signalized intersection capacity and LOS estimation procedures are built around the concept of average control delay per vehicle. Control delay is the portion of the total delay attributed to traffic signal operation for signalized intersections and this delay can be categorized into deceleration delay, stopped delay and acceleration delay. In India mainly two methods were using to estimate control delay those are field measurement and theoretical/analytical measurement. Field measurement of control delay includes the use of test-car observations, path tracing of individual vehicles, and the recording of arrival and departure volumes at Intersection but this expensive for long period. Analytical delay models of traffic systems are structured in a demand-supply framework and these models deals with the macroscopic method to estimate delay measurements. Whereas micro simulation based models are capable to estimate the individual delay of each vehicle at intersection and these models works on car following theory. The main objective of present study is to estimate delay and fuel loss during idling vehicles at signalized intersections in Ahmedabad city. For estimation of delay at intersections, typical corridor on drive in road in Ahmedabad city has been considered. Drive in road is one the busiest urban arterial corridor and this corridor connects the traffic coming from Thaltej intersection to Vijay Char Rasta Intersection.16hours classified traffic volume count surveys were conducted at four intersections falls in study corridor to observe the traffic volume and traffic composition. GPS based Velocity-Box (V-Box) apparatus was fitted in car to identify the existing speed and delay characteristics on the study corridor. VISSIM micro simulation software was adopted to simulate the traffic movement on the study corridor and to estimate the total delay including idling delay at the intersection. Base Case model was developed for the study corridor and the model has been validated on statistical grounds by using GEH statistics. The GEH is a widely used statistics for comparing the modelled values and observed values evolved through simulation tools. After validation, the developed model has been deployed to estimate the idling delay of each vehicle type at the intersection and this was compared with the observed data collected through floating car method. Fuel loss due to idling of vehicles at each intersection was estimated by considering available fuel loss data exists with CSIR-CRRI. Mitigation measures such as grade separated intersection were proposed in this study to reduce the fuel consumption on the study corridor. Further these mitigation measures were implemented in VISSIM model to quantify the reduction in fuel loss due to idling at each intersection. Comparative evaluation was made between base case and proposed scenario for the study corridor. It can be concluded that the micro simulation based technique is the most suited approach to estimate idling delay at the intersection. It was concluded from the study that minor geometric improvements and stabilizing the signal timings suggested for the corridor seems to reduce the delays and idling time drastically on the study corridor.