Abstract
Heavy rain causes the highest drop in travel speeds compared with light and moderate rain because it can easily induce flooding on road surfaces, which can continue to hinder urban transportation even after the rainfall is over. However, very few studies have specialized in researching the multistage impacts of the heavy rain process on urban roads, and the cumulative effects of heavy rain in road networks are often overlooked. In this study, the heavy rain process is divided into three consecutive stages, i.e., prepeak, peak, and postpeak. The impact of heavy rain on a road is represented by a three-dimensional traffic speed change ratio vector. Then, the k-means clustering method is implemented to reveal the distinct patterns of speed change ratio vectors. Finally, the characteristics of the links in each cluster are analyzed. An empirical study of Shenzhen, China suggests that there are three major impact patterns in links. The differences among links associated with the three impact patterns are related to the road category, travel speeds in no rain days, and the number of transportation facilities. The findings in this research can contribute to a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between the heavy rain process and the travel speeds of urban roads and provide valuable information for traffic management and personal travel in heavy rain weather.
Highlights
Adverse weather conditions, such as rain, may significantly influence the traffic efficiency of urban roads, such as travel speeds and times, resulting in a deterioration of road network performance [1,2,3,4,5,6]
We propose a multistage impact model that can reveal the effects of various heavy rain stages on the travel speeds of urban roads
To reduce the bias when evaluating the trend of the speed change, the median values of ∆vs(pre), ∆vs(peak), and ∆vs(post) on multiple heavy rain days are calculated to describe the general impacts of prepeak, peak, and postpeak heavy rain stages on link s, respectively
Summary
Adverse weather conditions, such as rain, may significantly influence the traffic efficiency of urban roads, such as travel speeds and times, resulting in a deterioration of road network performance [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Much of the literature analyzes the average decrease in traffic efficiency, such as travel speeds and times, with different rainfall intensities [5,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10, 557 the former stage, even if the rainfall intensities in these two periods are similar These different impacts cannot be distinguished by previous works that examined the average traffic efficiency decrease under light, moderate and heavy rain conditions. We propose a multistage impact model that can reveal the effects of various heavy rain stages on the travel speeds of urban roads. The final section provides concluding remarks and future research directions
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