Effects of dynamic speed limit strategies on capacity at freeway bottlenecks

Abstract

Projecte realitzat en el marc d’un programa de mobilitat amb Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

The objective of this Thesis is to understand the situation of a catalan highway with VSL strategies through empirical data of one day. It will be done using standard traffic tools to make the congested and uncongested states analysis. The Thesis will involve: visual identification of congested areas, bottleneck detection and diagnostic, identification of fundamental diagrams, lane density and speed distribution and comparison between speed limits and measured speeds. In addition, it will give recommendations and establish the basis for a future set of experiments to investigate VSL strategies in deep. The main findings are the detection of five bottlenecks, many lane changes near the ramps and the change of occupancy distribution between lanes in congested periods. After a careful and detailed analysis of the data we can conclude that VSL is not as effective as it should be. That is caused by the algorithm it uses and the fact that drivers disobey speed limits.

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://hdl.handle.net/2099.1/20673 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/