Evaluating Traffic Performance on Basra City Urban Roads Network

The continuous growth of the economy and population around the world has led to an increase in transportation demand. Consequently, the number of vehicles keeps increasing to satisfy the continued demand for transportation. Traffic congestion and delay, as a result, is becoming the norm in many big cities. The first step to alleviate the traffic congestion and delay is to gain a better understanding of the traffic operations at the city’s road network. This study tries to investigate and report about the traffic operations at urban roadways in Basra City, Southern of Iraq. With the focus of studying some of the main traffic parameters such as traffic flow, speed, travel time and delay at some selected sites with interrupted traffic flow within Basra City. Field traffic data from ۳۰ roadways sites has been collected by using two techniques, camcorders and floating car technique. Data analysis showed that most of the selected sites are running under their capacity with an average speed close to the posted speed limit. However, the analysis of data also showed that for the majority of times on these selected sites long travel time and traffic delays were experienced, with an average delay of around ۳.۰ minutes for each ۱.۰ km road length. This could be attributed to deficiencies in the operation of traffic signals at intersections, presence of illegal on-street curb parking (with double parking sometimes) and the absence of traffic enforcement controls (with associated penalties).

کلیدواژه ها:

Traffic Congestion ، Traffic Flow ، Average speed ، average travel time ، delay