The importance of reliable estimates of travel demands for effective planning, design, and management of roads and facilities is well known by transportation engineers. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) factoring method is widely used by highway agencies to estimate AADTs for a wide range of roads, which are not possible to be covered by the permanent counters. This approach assumes that roads within a functional class have similar traffic variations and thus factors derived from the class can be applied to short-term traffic counts (STTCs) to account for seasonal variations, which have been shown to produce large AADT estimation errors sometimes in the literature. This paper contributes to improving the AADT estimations by constructing seasonal traffic variation profiles using all historical short-term counts available without imposing any additional monitoring cost, or making any change to existing traffic monitoring programs. Two pattern matching methods are proposed and tested with the data from a permanent counter on a winter recreational road in Alberta, Canada. It is found that the resulting 95th percentile (P95) AADT estimation errors of the two methods are 10.5% and 8.4% respectively, with a contrast to 62.1% from the FHWA method.
Improving Group Assiginment and AADT Estimation Accuracy of Short-Term Traffic Counts Using Historical Seasonal Patterns
First International Conference on Transportation Information and Safety (ICTIS) ; 2011 ; Wuhan, China
ICTIS 2011 ; 1548-1554
2011-06-16
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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