Abstract
Rural two-lane highways are the most common road type both in Poland and globally. In terms of kilometres, their length is by far greater than that of motorways and expressways. They are roads of one carriageway for each direction, which makes the overtaking of slower vehicles possible only when there is a gap in the stream of traffic moving from the opposite direction. Motorways and express roads are dual carriageways that are expected to support high speed travel mainly over long distances. Express roads have somewhat lower technical parameters and a lower speed limit than motorways. Two-lane highways are used for both short- and long-distance travel. The paper presents selected studies conducted in Poland in 2016–2018 on rural two-lane highways and focuses on the context of the need for their reliability. The research was carried out on selected short and longer road sections located in various surroundings, grouped in terms of curvature change rate CCR, longitudinal slopes and cross-sections (width of lanes and shoulders). The studies of traffic volumes, travel time and travel speed, as well as traffic density, will be used to analyze traffic performance and identify measures of travel time reliability. The analyzed roads were characterized by good technical parameters and significant variability of traffic volume throughout the day, week and year. Some roads experience congestion, i.e., situations in which traffic volume Q is close to or above respective road capacity C. In order to determine the form of the suitable reliability measures, it will be important to determine the extent to which a road’s geometric and traffic characteristics impact travel speed and time. The paper presents well-known reliability measures for dual carriageways and proposes new measures, along with an evaluation of their usefulness in the assessment of the functioning of two-lane highways.
Highlights
Reliability is a major criterion for assessing selected elements of technical infrastructure such as transmission [1], information technology (IT) [2] or energy [3] infrastructure
Current computational methods mainly aim to assess the quality of traffic performance through analysis of measures of conditions including the average travel speed and the percentage of driving time in platoons [44], traffic density [43,45] and other indirect metrics such as the degree of capacity utilization or the reserve capacity
Especially when there are heavy vehicles in traffic, one can often observe platoon driving with vehicles following the leader
Summary
Reliability is a major criterion for assessing selected elements of technical infrastructure such as transmission [1], information technology (IT) [2] or energy [3] infrastructure. The reliability of road infrastructure is the subject of many studies, because of the role the parameter plays in traffic performance [4,5] and the safety of road users [6,7,8]. In simulation analyses and field research [24], the impact of selected parameters on the level of service (LOS) under heterogeneous traffic conditions for a two-lane highway was identified. The work [30] presents various techniques for examining road traffic parameters. It compares the pneumatic tube detector method, video capturing method, moving observer method and the classic manual method. Modern techniques allow the use of Bluetooth technology to collect data on traffic parameters [34,35,36] and Lidar technology to collect data on road and its surroundings parameters [37,38,39]
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