Improvement of the volume-delay function by incorporating the impact of trucks on traffic flow

Abstract

In current transportation modelling, travel time is the most important factor in decisions regarding transport modes, destinations and routes. The calculation of travel time is deployed by volume-delay functions (VDFs), a sub-model of route assignment procedure, using the correlation between increasing numbers of vehicles on a road and the road's restrictive capacity. By investigating existing VDFs, a clear gap is seen, demonstrating that current functions are not suited to reflect the empirically known large impact of trucks on passenger car travel times. This issue becomes crucial when transport models are used to reflect future scenarios where goods transportation is expected to increase greatly, and when transport models combine passenger and commercial traffic. This paper presents a new VDF which successfully includes trucks’ impact on traffic flow in the case of Germany and, with slight deviations, for North America. The function is developed using ideal-type data for German motorways. The differences between German and US data and their implications for VDFs are also discussed.