Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Influence of Darkness on Motorway Traffic Flow Characteristics
Johnnie Ben-Edigbe
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, UTM-Skudai, 81310 Johor, Malaysia, Tel.: + 6075532457, +60177520293; Fax: +6075532678
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 2014 22:4656-4660
Received: August 24, 2013 | Accepted: September 03, 2013 | Published: June 10, 2014
Abstract
The study is aimed at estimating the influence of darkness on motorways during dry weather. In a ‘with- and-without’ impact studies, motorway traffic flow characteristics at two different locations in Malaysia were investigated. Travel speed, traffic flow and headway data were obtained continuously for six weeks at selected sites and supplemented with darkness and daylight data culled from Malaysian Metrological Department website. Start of pitch darkness time was given as 19.45 pm. The study used 22:00 pm as start of pitch darkness. Results show that maximum flow rate, optimum travel speed, critical density and optimum headway did not differ significantly. The study concluded that motorway traffic flow characteristics are not influenced by darkness significantly.
Keywords:
Darkness, flowrate, headway, motorway, travel speed,
References
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Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2040-7467
ISSN (Print): 2040-7459 |
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