Date of Award
2022
Publication Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.Sc.
Department
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Keywords
Toll information system, Toll lanes, Collision risk
Supervisor
C. Lee
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This study assessed the impacts of presence and location of the toll information system on the traffic performance and safety at toll plaza on the Gordie Howe International Bridge. The toll information displays the information on toll payment methods (manual toll collection (MTC), automatic toll collection (ATC) and electronic toll collection (ETC)) for cars or heavy vehicles (HV) via variable message signs (VMS) upstream of toll booth. The study also assessed the impacts of the toll information system with different toll lane configuration for current traffic demand and different percentages of heavy vehicles (HV) to reduce the collision risk at toll plaza. To evaluate the impacts, three scenarios (no VMS, VMS 140 m from the entry gate, and separate VMS for car and HV 75 m before the merge point) were developed and compared using the VISSM microscopic traffic simulation model. Results show that VMS before the merge point had marginal benefit of reducing average delay and reduced rear-end and lane-change collision risk compared to the no VMS scenario. Results also show that converting the toll lanes with multiple toll payment methods to ETC-only lanes with the VMS before the merge point reduced the delay and rear-end and lane-change collision risk compared to the current configuration. Moreover, increasing the number of HV-only lanes from 3 to 4 for higher percentage of HVs with the VMS before the merge point marginally reduced the delay but increased lane-change collision risk compared to the current configuration. This indicates that the installation of ETC-only lanes can potentially improve traffic performance and safety for the current traffic demand but increasing the number of HV-only lanes for higher percentage of HVs can degrade the safety benefit of the system. This study demonstrates that toll lane configuration must be controlled to accommodate varying traffic demand to enhance the effectiveness the toll information system in improving traffic performance and safety.
Recommended Citation
Zahedieh, Farnaz, "Advanced Toll Information System and Toll Lane Configuration to Reduce Collision Risk" (2022). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 9138.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/9138