A Regional Traffic Simulation/Assignment Model for Evaluation of Transit Performance and Asset Utilization

The proposed study will provide Chicago's RTA with the necessary modeling capabilities and tools to evaluate the regional impact of deploying various bus priority and operational management strategies for transit. Further, the team will assist RT A personnel to systematically develop and analyze all necessary scenarios for deployment and control, so that the impacts of these strategies are well understood. Impacts to be considered include travel time benefits to transit riders, increases in transit rider-ship and increased efficiency in utilization of transit equipment, as well as travel time and routing effects on general traffic. To achieve the above objectives, a hybrid micro-/meso-scopic simulation/assignment model called VIST A (Visual Interactive System for Transportation Algorithms) developed by researchers at Northwestern University (NU) and other institutions will be enhanced and used to account for the propagation of transit vehicles and their interactions with the highway users, as well as various transit priority strategies such as signal preemption. Further, mode and route choice decisions will be captured by modeling complete trips of both people and vehicles as they move through the regional multimodal network. The model will be calibrated to capture the Chicago reality in the best possible way based on readily available data, obtained from existing sources including RT A, CATS, IDOT, and municipalities. The data will be integrated into the VISTA framework and various scenarios that account for different combinations of transit priority and scheduling control will be developed, simulated and analyzed. The research will be carried out mainly by a team of professors and graduate students from NU with the guidance of R T A personnel in the design and analysis of scenarios. A Technical Advisory Committee will be formed to monitor and assist the research team in the study. VISTA is a simulation/assignment approach, which includes routing algorithms to collectively compute the equilibrium routes of all vehicles in the network.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Contract to a Performing Organization has not yet been awarded.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $209494.00
• Contract Numbers:

  MRUTC 03-03

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Research and Special Programs Administration

  University Research and Education, 400 7th Street, SW
  Washington, DC    20590-

  Midwest Regional University Transportation Center

  University of Wisconsin
  2205 Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive, Room 272
  Madison, WI  United States  53706
• Project Managers:

  Bittner, Jason

• Principal Investigators:

  Ziliaskopoulos, Thanasis

• Start Date: 20021124
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• Source Data: RiP Project 7794

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Asset management; Research projects; Ridership; Traffic assignment; Traffic simulation; Transit riders; Transit traffic
• Subject Areas: Finance; Passenger Transportation; Public Transportation; Research;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01459241
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Midwest Regional University Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: MRUTC 03-03
• Files: RIP, USDOT
• Created Date: Jan 3 2013 12:59PM