A Comparison of Freeway Flow-Occupancy Relationship

Abstract

<p> Traffic operations can be described by the relationship that occurs between flow and occupancy. This paper investigates the flow-occupancy relationship of an Ontario system and a Minnesota system to see if the same general relationship occurs in different locations. It is hoped that this investigation will help to further the work being done at McMaster in developing a new incident detection algorithm.</p> <p> In comparing the two data sets, simple analytical procedures were employed to compare the full data set, the uncongested regime, and the calculated fitted lines for the uncongested data. Visual comparison was the basis for much of the analysis.</p> <p> When the comparisons were conducted the relationships were indeed very similar, signifying that the flow-occupancy relationship is the same for different locations.</p>