Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Civil Engineering
Committee Chair
Michael D. Anderson
Committee Member
Virginia P. Sisiopiku
Committee Member
Sampson Gholston
Committee Member
Hongyu Zhou
Committee Member
Ashraf Z Al-Hamdan
Subject(s)
Traffic flow., Land use--United States., Traffic congestion., Traffic engineering--Mathematical models., Urban transportation--Forecasting.
Abstract
A travel demand forecasting model is known as the four step process namely trip generation, trip distribution, mode split, and traffic assignment to estimate expected traffic volume on a roadway network for a study area as a means of doing highway planning. Adding land use feedback to travel demand model facilitates the interaction between them based on different proposed scenarios. Changes in land use causing travel demand in most metropolitan areas result in the rapid expansion of transportation infrastructure, utilities and constructing new facilities to serve new dispersed communities. Unfortunately, an inevitable consequence of such a trend is urban sprawl which includes the spreading outwards of a city and its suburbs to its outskirts to low-density and auto-dependent development on rural land and is the root of many environmental problems. Land use model controls the expansion or building new route without looking at the underutilized roads or the disperse growth of cities that means growing trend of urban sprawl. Any change in travel cost or detrimental growth pattern does not have any significant influence on future land use or location choice of future household and employment. Furthermore, the changes in land use patterns and transportation network growth do not consider the underutilization of existing network. Finding ways to outline a simplified methodology that can combine land use change, spatial growth and utilization of the available capacity of existing network, would be beneficial to all communities where urban sprawl needs to be addressed and resolved by promoting a sustainable land use planning and transport systems. This document presents how estimation of origin/destination matrix can be the key part to assimilate land use change, sprawl and utilization of available capacity in one canvas or on one platform. At first, estimation of OD matrix from existing traffic counts has been implemented to determine through trips that were compared with that of Bluetooth dataset for validation. The outcome of this research gives more insight of how estimation of OD matrix can be applied in answering a large scope. Secondly, this technique was applied to examine the sensitivity of generating an actual OD matrix with the removal of traffic counts in a predictable manner for a larger network. It provides a better understanding of Origin/Destination Matrix Estimation (ODME) tool built in TransCAD 4.7 and the acceptable level of traffic counts required to estimate the origin/destination matrix accurately using user equilibrium assignment since most communities do not have traffic counts available on all roadways. Lastly, outcomes of a simplified binary logistic regression model representing future land use change and scoring urban sprawl at Traffic Analysis Zone level can be combined into one platform through the use of ODME tool where available capacity of the existing network can be treated as traffic counts. It can offer the formulation and testing of different hypothetical planning scenarios by adding the aspects of land use change and limiting the growth where there is nominal space or a prominent existence of sprawling area. This study addresses urban sprawl and available capacity utilization and combines those features with land use change model for having a notion of forming more compact cities. This research conducted a rigorous step by step analysis to determine a better solution or a more compact trip table that results in more trips inside the City of Huntsville. Based on the least amount of vehicle mileage traveled and a minimum number of congested links, a preferred scenario was identified that is one of the major contributions of this exploration. Hence, it is a preliminary initiative to build compact cities using current resources instead of the planning of future road network solely depending on the land use forecast model.
Recommended Citation
Khan, Tahmina, "Promoting transportation sustainability by suggesting/limiting changes in future land use through utilizing available roadway capacity" (2016). Dissertations. 93.
https://louis.uah.edu/uah-dissertations/93