Title: Using traffic simulation to quantify performance improvement due to vehicular traffic reduction at a university campus

Authors: Khaled Hamad

Addresses: Sustainable Civil Infrastructure Research Group, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to quantify the benefits of reducing vehicular traffic at a university campus resulting from adopting sustainable transport modes to travel to campus. To this end, a traffic simulation model was developed to estimate improvements in several traffic and environmental performance measures. A total of 11 traffic scenarios were simulated and their results were compared. These scenarios varied from a baseline situation, i.e., the current AM peak-hour traffic, to a variety of traffic-reduction scenarios ranging from 5% to 50% with an increment of 5%. The results showed considerable improvements in traffic flow and air-pollution performance measures. All performance measures witnessed steady improvement as more traffic reduction occurred; nevertheless, traffic measures have seen more improvement as opposed to environmental measures. Statistical significance tests showed that 5% traffic reductions did not show significant impacts on performance, 10% reductions will improve traffic flow, whereas 20% traffic reductions will improve both traffic and air emissions.

Keywords: transportation at university campus; traffic microsimulation; microscopic traffic simulation; environmental impacts; traffic reduction; Sharjah University City; SUC.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2020.107331

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2020 Vol.15 No.3, pp.295 - 307

Received: 11 Jan 2019
Accepted: 23 Aug 2019
Published online: 15 May 2020 *

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