Driver speed behavior constitutes a critical aspect in the assessment of the performance of road infrastructure vis-a-vis safety in mountainous terrain. The present study has been conducted to study driver speed behavior on roads in mountainous terrain by analyzing the variability of minimum speed positions on curved and maximum speed positions on tangent road sections. Significant variability is observed to be associated with the minimum speed position on curves and maximum speed position on tangents on four-lane roads in mountainous terrain. Further, the associated variabilities in maximum and minimum speed positions are also characterized with the best-fitted distributions. Higher variability of minimum and maximum speed positions on curves and tangents signifies the necessity of considering the complete length of curves and tangents in the formulation of the operating speed prediction models and the findings also have crucial implications for the safety evaluation of four-lane highways in mountainous terrain.
Activity-based travel demand models have reached a state of maturity but, several challenges remain in their survey design, format, administration technique, sample size determination and constraints faced during field survey. This research is an attempt to explore these issues and suggest way forward towards developing an efficient survey instrument and survey strategy for deployment in emerging countries like India and particularly during the post-pandemic period. A two-step approach of pre-pilot and pilot survey has been adopted to test our survey format and strategy before the conduct of final survey while considering the low literacy rate, qualitative inputs by enumerators, quantitative performance measures; average survey duration, percentage of error and response rate, acceptance rate and cost of survey and impact of the pandemic. A new compact, open-interval based, hybrid activity-travel diary format is proposed along with a hybrid method for data collection and validation and various recommendations for field survey strategies.
Transportation investments are primarily driven by the objective to enhance the accessibility and mobility of people and goods, thereby contributing to the social and economic development of communities. This study examines transportation equity in Bangalore in the context of two types of disturbances on equity: recurring urban floods and fare hikes. While urban floods have a short-term but profound impact, fare hikes result in prolonged economic impacts, both significantly affecting the Quality of Life (QoL) and well-being of citizens. To assess equity, an exploratory survey focusing on parameters of accessibility and affordability was employed. Statistical methods such as cluster analysis and McNemar’s test were carried out to extract patterns and insights from the collected data. The impact of fare hikes assessed using McNemar’s test revealed a 31.5
The extraction of vehicle trajectories is essential for understanding traffic flow characteristics and developing effective road traffic management strategies. For this, the aim of this work is to develop an end-to-end model to extract trajectory data from video footage, which includes vehicle detection and classification. As a first step, vehicle detection and classification models were trained using a combination of two existing datasets, IITM-HeTra and FGVD. This approach achieved a mAP50 score of 0.91, which is the best result compared to those obtained using other dataset combinations or individual datasets. Subsequently, vehicle trajectory was extracted using a model trained with YOLOv8, which involved tracking detected vehicles on the screen and obtaining pixel coordinates. The OpenCV library was utilized to convert the obtained pixel coordinates into latitude and longitude data, which were then mapped using Google Earth Pro. The developed model can be applied to any video data to obtain precise vehicle trajectory information, with Google Maps aiding in accurate mapping.
The underlined study focusses on investigating the rheological properties of bitumen binders VG-30 and bituminous mastic modified with hydrophilic nanoclay (NC). Varied dosages (0
