Abstract
The impact of inclement weather on traffic flow has been extensively studied in the literature. However, little research has unveiled how local weather conditions affect real-time traffic flows both spatially and temporally. By analysing the real-time traffic flow data of Traffic Signal Controllers (TSCs) and weather information in Brisbane, Australia, this paper aims to explore weather’s impact on traffic flow, more specifically, rainfall’s impact on traffic flow. A suite of analytic methods has been applied, including the space-time cube, time-series clustering, and regression models at three different levels (i.e., comprehensive, location-specific, and aggregate). Our results reveal that rainfall would induce a change of the traffic flow temporally (on weekdays, Saturday, and Sunday and at various periods on each day) and spatially (in the transportation network). Particularly, our results consistently show that the traffic flow would increase on wet days, especially on weekdays, and that the urban inner space, such as the central business district (CBD), is more likely to be impacted by inclement weather compared with other suburbs. Such results could be used by traffic operators to better manage traffic in response to rainfall. The findings could also help transport planners and policy analysts to identify the key transport corridors that are most susceptible to traffic shifts in different weather conditions and establish more weather-resilient transport infrastructures accordingly.
Highlights
The recent expansion of urban areas has brought the diversity of transportation modes in order to meet the increasing traffic demands in daily life, which leads to a larger amount of traffic flow on roads [1]
Many of the studies primarily focused on the fluctuation of the quantities of traffic flow that are affected by inclement weather and very few studies explored the impact of wet weather conditions on temporal and spatial patterns of traffic flow
The main contribution of this study is that the spatial-temporal impact of inclement weather conditions on traffic flow has been consistently detected using the visual detections and modellings at different levels
Summary
The recent expansion of urban areas has brought the diversity of transportation modes in order to meet the increasing traffic demands in daily life, which leads to a larger amount of traffic flow on roads [1]. The negative influence of adverse weather on traffic situation is becoming a major concern to transportation authorities and agencies [4]. The traffic pattern in adverse weather might be different in contrast to the situation in a dry weather condition [5]. Inclement weather affects transportation in three aspects—demand, safety, and capacity (flow of traffic)—which has been extensively investigated in the literature [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Many of the studies primarily focused on the fluctuation of the quantities of traffic flow that are affected by inclement weather and very few studies explored the impact of wet weather conditions on temporal and spatial patterns of traffic flow. Some efforts have been made to quantify the spatial-temporal patterns of real-time traffic flow [10,11,12,13], few of them associated the spatial-temporal patterns of real-time traffic flow with weather information (especially the inclement weather information)
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