Analysis of traffic growth on a rural highway: A case study from India

Abstract

Over the years, the rate of traffic growth had always been a significant concern in the development of road infrastructures as it could either lead to premature failure of the pavement or could result in the wastage of valuable resources. The lack of proper study regarding the prediction of traffic growth has led to development of concerns in this field. The present study attempts to develop traffic forecasting models using the data collected from 2013 to 2017at the Paliyekkara toll plaza situated in southern part of India. The study identified Gross Domestic Product, population and vehicle ownership as the main factors that influence traffic growth and an exponential model was developed relating these factors with traffic volume. The proposed model was then validated by comparing the forecasted traffic with the actual traffic data of 2018. Further, on comparing with the output from existing models, it was concluded that the proposed model outperforms the available models as it had the least error in prediction. The study also modeled the variation in traffic volume that occurs in a year and this could be used to forecast the traffic for any particular month of any year. 2019 Institute for Transport Studies in the European Economic Integration. All rights reserved.