Author(s)

Y. Makigami, T. Isizuka & M. Hori

Abstract

Traffic conditions in Japanese urban districts are becoming worse every year and the congestion along urban expressways develops from many bottlenecks, which bring adverse effects on urban social, economical and industrial activities. Therefore attention is being given to physical design and network improvements such as bypass constructions and widenings as well as to quick effective operational measures such as ramp metering. Especially attention is being given to operational countermeasures on the merging zones along a congested route of an urban expressway because electric toll collection system is going to be installed on the Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo as well as the Hanshin Expressway in Osaka and Kobe. Those operational countermeasures possibly applicable to the Hanshin Expressway include ramp metering, lane changes restriction between through lanes near merging zones as well as installation of lane dividers on the merging zone which lets merging drivers make single merge only. This paper describes the model structure, computation logic as well as application results of a computer simulation model hereafter called \“ Merging Traffic Simulation Model” developed to evaluate the effectiveness of the above mentioned operational countermeasures for the urban expressway merging zones.

Keywords