PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF DIVIDED MULTILANE RURAL HIGHWAY

Abstract

This research represents an evaluation of divided rural highway sections. The objectives of this study are to evaluate the fundamental parameters and service quality of traffic flow for highway sections between Ramadi and Falluja. Such, evaluation is going to be made by developing a statistical models to improve capacity and level of service by the speed-flow-density basic relationships. Forty sections (twenty for each bound) are selected to satisfy the objectives and specifications of this study. Data of traffic flow and traffic composition were collected during peak periods by using video recording techniques for all selected sections in both directions during morning and evening periods. Free Flow Speed data were collected by the same technique and for all section in off peak periods. These collected data were then abstracted by the aid of computer programs developed by researcher and others for those purposes. The video recording of data collection was started on Sunday in (2nd ,Oct.,2011) and it was recorded for three months. The data are abstracted by using the "EVENT" program, then analyzed and processed by using computer programs, which were written by Visual Basic programming language. While road geometric data are collected at the site. The produced data indicated that the vehicles average speed are (81 and 80 km/hr) for northbound and southbound respectively for all highway sections. The speed frequency distributions show that they follow normal distributions for all sections.

Field surveys are made to collect new data that were abstracted and processed to build statistical regression models, which were used to improve highway capacity, level of service and predict speed models in horizontal alignments. Sections had LOS (C) were improved according to the predicted regression models.