A Study on Performance of an Urban Arterial Corridor

Transportation Engineering is a branch of Civil engineering that uses engineering techniques to achieve safe and efficient movement of people goods. Highway safety has become a dire need for which traffic engineering is of great use as it uses physics and vehicle dynamics as well as road users physiology and human factors engineering in giving detailed information for safety purposes. It deals with functional part of transportation system. Information about traffic must be regularly updated to keep pace with ever changing transportation system. Traffic surveys are the means of obtaining information in this regard. For a complete description of traffic stream modeling, one would require flow, speed and density. So quantification of speeds and delays using moving observer method is considered. It has capacity to provide simultaneous measurement of traffic stream variable. Fundamental stream characteristics are known easily. In accordance with the above method acceleration and deceleration studies are taken in to account. The curves of acceleration and deceleration are obtained for different volumes of traffic. Both the studies are compared and traffic characteristics and the problems with the smooth moving vehicles are identified depending on the results of two traffic surveys. For this purpose a stretch of 2 km is considered. The vehicular characteristics, stream flow and the inconveniences caused to traffic are drawn using those surveys and finally solutions are proposed based on the conclusions drawn.