Abstract
In the contemporary sustainable urban set up, one of the critical issues adversely affecting the quality of life in urban areas and inflicting immense costs on cities is traffic congestion. Traffic congestion is an outgrowth of increased traffic flow in certain locations of large cities. Recently, urban decision-makers and transportation planners resort to one-way traffic system as an effective traffic management strategy, which has a profound effect on reducing traffic congestion and improving traffic flow, leading to urban sustainability. In the present paper, the authors endeavored to develop a novel methodological framework based on optimization techniques in order to mitigate traffic congestion through one-way traffic network reconfiguration. To test the efficacy of the proposed methodological framework, two cases were analyzed and evaluated: the Sioux Falls transportation network as a medium-sized one and a real-world large-scale transportation network of the city of Isfahan in Iran. Through the first instance, it can be seen that the proposed method can effectively reduce the total travel time in the area of interest by approximately 9%. The numerical results for the transportation network of Isfahan, justified the practical value of the model and solution method through converting proper links to one-way. As the calculation results of two cases have demonstrated, the solution can effectively reduce the total travel time of travelers in a certain congested urban area.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Transportation and Traffic Department of Isfahan Municipality and Isfahan University of Technology for their supports.
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HK: Conceiving of the presented idea, designing the model and the computational framework, writing parts of the manuscript. BG: Literature search and review, manuscript writing and preparation, analysis and interpretation of results, making critical revisions and checking the references. SNSB: Supervised the research, making the simulations, and acts as corresponding author. S-MH: Developing the theory, solving the multi objective decision making problem, writing parts of the manuscript. NR: Designing and performing the experiments, data collection, writing parts of manuscript. All authors provided feedback and helped shape the research and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Karimi, H., Ghadirifaraz, B., Shetab Boushehri, S.N. et al. Reducing traffic congestion and increasing sustainability in special urban areas through one-way traffic reconfiguration. Transportation 49, 37–60 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-020-10162-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-020-10162-4