Economic Evaluation of urban traffic improvement through sequential coordination of signals

Abstract

If the transportation system is efficient, they offer economic and social opportunities and benefits that lead to positive multiplier effects such as better access to the market, employment, and additional investment. Inadequate transportation systems in terms of capacity and reliability can lead to economic costs such as reduced or missed opportunities and poor quality of life. Traffic congestion on the roads and intersections due to increased number of vehicles to serve the ever-increasing population has become a major issue. User spends a major part of its time in traffic congestion and loses its productivity and money in terms of fuel wastage. The losses incurred because of traffic congestion are generally calculated in terms of equivalent monetary losses of environmental losses, productivity losses, monetary loss of time etc. A major part of traffic congestion occurs at road intersections, because of its faulty design or mostly, because of the calculation of signal phase timings which do not serve its purpose of traffic management during the peak hours, resulting in excessive vehicular delays and sometimes, absolute stalling of traffic. To solve this problem, several infrastructural and technological solutions like road widening, traffic diversion, clearing of illegal encroachment, prevention of illegal on street parking etc., can be envisaged. Infrastructural solutions are mostly expensive and not efficient enough in proportion to the initial investment it requires whereas the technological solutions like Artificial Intelligence in coordinated traffic signaling were found to be comparably more efficient in western countries. This research will investigate the issue of congestion at road intersection, analyzing its various causative factors and how much this vehicular delay costs to an individual and to the economy of the city as well. It will try to find out best suitable artificial intelligence based solution for easing out the traffic through road intersections to reduce the vehicular delays at the intersections and mitigate the various adverse impacts. The study will also try to analyze the existing traffic scenario in the study location selected for pilot study before deploying Artificial Intelligence based coordinated signal system and again analyzing and interpreting the Pre-coordination and Post-coordination scenario to quantify the efficiency of the coordinated traffic signaling system over conventional traffic signaling systems used in the Indian cities.