From several points of view, freeways are a desirable urban technology. Not only do they provide high levels of mobility and traffic capacity, but their safety, fuel consumption and pollution-generation characteristics are the best available. Even in terms of noise generation and its impact on the urban environment, it is desirable to have maximum traffic diversion from surface streets to appropriately designed freeway facilities. Yet freeway development is not without its costs. Opposition has grown, and now assumes a dominant position, politically, throughout much of North America, because the construction of freeways has often entailed severe disruptions of settled communities. These disruptions are referred to collectively as "community impact". The problem of this paper is the design and performance evaluation of a limited form of freeway, a form which attempts to minimize community impact. To the extent that such a form is possible, the environmental and other advantages of continuous-flow operation of motor vehicles will be available at lower social cost. The study begins by identifying the impacts to be avoided. "Residential displacement", "visual intrusion", JL'noise impact" and "traffic focal points and 'dumping' of traffic" are potential impacts of freeway construction and operation. Because of the nature of the designs being considered, "difficulties of local access and parking" is included for examination, as is the satisfactoriness of the highway driving environment. The general conclusions of the study are as follows. (1) Residential displacement would be limited to the removal of one house on the 3»2 mile test route. (2) The highway would not be visually intrusive since it would be completely hidden from view. (3) At maximum noise generation, one of the test designs would produce no impact at nearby buildings and from "marginal" to "definite" impact at sidewalks adjacent to the facility; the other design would produce a "marginal" impact at the building facade and a "definite" impact at the sidewalk, (k) There would be no dumping of traffic in the study area. (The facility performs only the line-haul function with no collector/distributor element.) (5) Local access and parking could be assured, but would require the upgrading of rear lanes the parking of vehicles on private property. (6) The visual quality of the highway driving environment, though less than ideal, is judged to be satisfactory. Unfortunately the less effective of the designs from a noise containment point of view is probably the most desirable aesthetically. (7) Total development cost of each of the "minimal impact" designs approximates the total dollar costs of conventional inner-city freeways. It is concluded that minimal impact freeways appear to be feasible, both technically and economically, for the line-haul function across inner suburbs. Since it now appears possible to construct limited forms of freeway with little adverse community effect, freeways should no longer be considered a non-option for built-up-areas. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

Automated vehicles (AVs) are becoming more common each day as car manufacturers have started to include advanced driving assistant systems (ADAS) in trendline models. The most basic level of vehicle automation includes Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) can disrupt and change traffic flow. The current study proposes the development of controlled experiments to obtain traffic flow properties for vehicles equipped with ACC in different scenarios. As part of this dissertation, the effects of ACC on capacity are quantified at steady state conditions, meaning cruising speeds or free flow, and at bottlenecks, where speed fluctuations occur. The effects of ACC on traffic flow properties are also assessed by the construction and study of the Fundamental Diagram. Lastly, the vehicles are submitted to less predictable deceleration scenarios that involve a leading vehicle driven in ACC mode and a leading vehicle driven manually. The reaction of ACC for these cases is documented. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The travel-time flow relationship is not always increasing in nature, it is very difficult to predict precisely. Traditional method fails to replicate this unique conditions. Until millennium, although various researchers and practitioners have given much attention to develop travel-time flow relationships, the advancement to improve travel-time flow relationships was not substantial. The knowledge about the travel-time flow relationship is not commensurate with or parallel to the advancement of new knowledge in other fields. After millennium, most investigators did not devote enough attention to create new knowledge, except for application and performance evaluation of the existing knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to provide a new theoretical and methodological advancement in travel-time flow relationship. Consequentially, this research proposes a new methodology, which considers stochastic behavior of travel-time flow relationship with probabilistic Bayesian statistics and logistic growth mapping techniques. This research moderately improves the travel-time flow relationship. The unique contribution of this research is that the proposed methods outperforms the existing traditional travel-time flow theory, assumptions, and modeling techniques. The results shows that the proposed model is considerably a good candidate for travel-time predictions. The proposed model performs 36 percent better and accurate travel-time predictions in compared to the existing models. Furthermore, travel-time flow relationship need capacity and free-flow speed estimations. Traditionally, practice of capacity estimation is mostly practical, subjective, and not steady-state capacity. Therefore, a robust and stable capacity-estimation method was developed to eliminate the subjectivity of capacity estimation. The proposed model shows robust and capable of replicating steady-state capacity estimation. The free-flow speed estimation should relate to the traffic-flow speed model while the density is zero. Therefore, this research investigates the existing deterministic speed-density models and recommends a better methodology in free-flow speed estimation. This research presents how the undefined practice of free-flow speed selection can be sensitive. Additionally, finding suitable concurrent travel-time data and traffic volume is crucial and very challenging. To collect concurrent data, this research investigates and develops several technologies such as crowdsource, web app, virtual sensor method, test vehicle, smartphone, global positioning system, and utilized several state and local agencies data collection efforts. Keywords: Travel-Time Flow, Travel-Time Delay, Volume-Delay Function, Travel Time, Origin-Destination Survey, Travel Demand Model, Travel Data Collection, Transportation Survey, Internet Sensor, Crowdsourcing, Virtual Sensor Method, VSM, Transportation Planning, GPS, Smartphone, Loop Detector, Travel -Time Prediction, Travel-Speed Prediction, TDM, Bayesian Inference, Logistic Growth Function.

Master of Science

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