As the U.S. population, economy and global trade continue to grow, the demand for travel on our limited capacity highways will continue to increase steadily. Currently, many of the highways surrounding major urbanized areas are operating at or near capacity during the rush hours causing chronic congestion, wasting of fuel and further polluting the air. In recent decades with fiscal deficit and financial constraints, the major focus of highway agencies across the nation had been and will continue to be the cost effective traffic management and elimination of major bottlenecks along busy highway corridors. Busy interchanges are often the cause of chronic congestion at corridor and network level that are required to redesign for the operational and capacity improvement purpose. However, given the demands and travel patterns, identification of a rightly configured interchange for a particular location is the key to improve the interchange capacity and system performance. In this study, three different interchange configurations (namely full cloverleaf, all directional with shared ramps, and all directional with independent ramps) are simulated using CORSIM micro-simulation model. In an exploratory nature, various levels of throughputs and ramp flows are modeled by establishing the relations among throughput volume, roadway capacity, vehicle composition, and entrance and exit ramp volumes. The strengths and weaknesses of the three selected interchange configurations are then identified from an operational prospective. It is expected that the findings of this study would assist the transportation planners/traffic engineers to identify the most suitable interchange type for a newly build interchange or redesign an existing interchange under a set of demand conditions toward eliminating the major highway bottleneck.


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    Title :

    A Simulation-Based Operations Evaluation of Major Interchange Configurations


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    International Conference on Transportation and Development 2016 ; 2016 ; Houston, Texas



    Publication date :

    2016-06-20




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English





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