EVALUATION THE TRAFFIC OPERATION FOR ARTERIAL HIGHWAYS WITHIN HILLA CITY BY USING HCS

Hilla city is the center of Babylon Governorate. A huge number of trucks and buses pass through the city of Hilla every day because it is located between the crossroads of three important cities, Baghdad; the capital, as well as the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf; the religious tourism center in Iraq. In addition the development of the city and the growing population as a result the increase of automobiles within a city. The previous reasons pose a danger to traffic condition. This study focus on the evaluation the performance of traffic for some arterial highways. The chosen roadways are multilane highways included 4 arterial highways 60- street. Survey for sections of theses highways are conducted to collect data of the desired information like traffic volume by video recording, geometry of sites by tools of measurement. Software program HCS is used to analyze data, where HCS is employed to determinate the Level-of-Service LOS making use of GIS tool to help in display results. Output of HCS introduces that highways operate with level of service between A to E and there is no segment process with LOS F. The percent of flow-rate less than 1400 is 37.1% of selection sections. Previous results indicate that the traffic situation is mostly good