I-40 Lane Reversal Traffic Analysis

摘要

A detailed traffic analysis and related research was conducted for the I-40 Lane Reversal Plan. The I-40 Lane Reversal Plan was developed jointly by the North Carolina Department of Transportation and Department of Crime Control and Public Safety to expedite the safe and efficient evacuation of the New Hanover County coastal region under hurricane threat conditions. The objectives of this research were to generate and compare several measures of effectiveness (MOEs) from microsimulation models to investigate the effects of lane reversal on the performance of the evacuation network. The MOEs analyzed in this modeling effort were queue lengths, average link speeds and throughput at key nodes. Thus the primary research issues regarding lane reversal operations were: (1) Will the lane reversal increase throughput and average link speeds while reducing queue lengths; (2) Is the current storm severity threshold set for triggering the lane reversal set at an appropriate level; (3) Are there bottleneck points in the network upstream of the lane reversal, on the lane reversal proper, or at the downstream termination that could lessen the benefit of contraflow operation. The research methodology, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are presented.