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This study proposes a methodical approach to model desired speed distributions under different road-weather and traffic conditions followed by identification of road-weather conditions with potentially higher safety risks in rural divided highways located in extremely cold regions. Desired speed distributions encompassing unique combinations of adverse road-weather and traffic conditions are modelled as normal distributions characterized by their means and standard deviations formulated based on two principal statistical theorems and techniques i.e., Central Limit Theorem and Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimation. Combination of the precipitation conditions, road surface conditions, time of the day, temperature, traffic flow and the heavy vehicle percentage at the time of travel were considered in defining the combinations of road-weather and traffic conditions. The findings reveal that simultaneous occurrence of particular precipitation and pavement conditions significantly affect the characteristics of the desired speed distribution and potentially expose drivers to elevated safety risks. Jurisdictions experiencing extreme road-weather conditions may adapt the proposed methodology to assess speed behaviour under different road-weather conditions to establishing and deploying weather-responsive traffic management strategies such as variable speed limit to regulate speeding and improve traffic safety in winter.

The traditional full-scan method is commonly used for identifying critical links in road networks. This method simulates each link to be closed iteratively and measures its impact on the efficiency of the whole network. It can accurately identify critical links. However, in this method, traffic assignments are conducted under all scenarios of link disruption, making this process prohibitively time-consuming for large-scale road networks. This paper proposes an approach considering the traffic flow betweenness index (TFBI) to identify critical links, which can significantly reduce the computational burden compared with the traditional full-scan method. The TFBI consists of two parts: traffic flow betweenness and endpoint origin-destination (OD) demand (rerouted travel demand). There is a weight coefficient between these two parts. Traffic flow betweenness is established by considering the shortest travel-time path betweenness, link traffic flow and total OD demand. The proposed approach consists of the following main steps. First, a sample road network is selected to calibrate the weight coefficient between traffic flow betweenness and endpoint OD demand in the TFBI using the network robustness index. This index calculates changes in the whole-system travel time due to each link's closure under the traditional full-scan method. Then, candidate critical links are pre-selected according to the TFBI value of each link. Finally, a given number of real critical links are identified from the candidate critical links using the traditional full-scan method. The applicability and computational efficiency of the TFBI-based approach are demonstrated for the road network in Changchun, China. Published version

Urban traffic is an important source of global CO2 emissions. Uncovering the temporal and structural characteristics can provide scientific support to identify the variation regulation and main subjects of urban traffic CO2 emissions. The road class is one of the most important factors influencing the urban traffic CO2 emissions. Based on the annual traffic field monitoring work in 2014 and the localized MOVES model, this study unravels the temporal variation and structural characteristics of the urban traffic CO2 emissions and conducts a comparative analysis of expressway (5R) and arterial road (DB), two typical classes of urban roads in Beijing. Obvious differences exist in the temporal variation characteristics of the traffic CO2 emissions between the expressway and arterial road at the annual, week and daily scales. The annual traffic CO2 emissions at the expressway (5R, with 47271.15 t) are more than ten times than those of the arterial road (DB, with 4139.19 t). Stronger weekly "rest effect" is observed at the expressway than the arterial road. The daily peak time and duration of the traffic CO2 emissions between the two classes of urban roads show significant differences particular in the evening peak. The differences of the structural characteristics between the two classes of urban roads are mainly reflected on the contribution of the public and freight transportation. Passenger vehicles play a predominant role at both the two classes of urban roads. The public transportation contributed more at DB (24.76%) than 5R (5.47%), and the freight transportation contributed more at 5R (23.41%) than DB (3.49%). The results suggest that the influence of traffic CO2 emissions on the CO2 flux is significant at the residential and commercial mixed underlying urban areas with arterial roads (DB) but not significant at the underlying urban park area with expressway (5R) in this study. The vegetation cover in urban areas have effects on the CO2 reduction. Increasing the design and construction of the green space along the urban roads with busy traffic flow will be an effective way to mitigate the urban traffic CO2 emissions and build the low-carbon cities.

This paper quantifies behavioural responses to changes in the jurisdiction of a congestion charge, with a successive focus on (i) an extension and (ii) a reduction in the size of the charging zone. We exploit the unanticipated nature of both the implementation and removal of London’s Western Expansion Zone (WEZ) as quasi-natural experiments to test whether individual responses to policies are asymmetric. We use the UK Department of Transport Annual Average Daily Flow (AADF) data, which records traffic flows for seven transport modes (including cars, buses, bicycles, heavy and light goods vehicles). Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the introduction of the WEZ led to a 4.9% decline in road traffic flows in the new congestion charge area. These results are robust to different model specifications. HGVs traffic did not significantly change post-WEZ, which indicates that their road demand is price inelastic. The removal of the WEZ led to no significant variations in traffic. This result indicates asymmetry in behaviour with persistent changes in post-intervention traffic demand levels.

In order to study driving performance at the opening section of median strip (hereafter OSMS) on the freeway capacity expansion project, this study separately controlled 9 different simulated experimental scenarios of OSMS length and freeway traffic flow. 25 participants were recruited to perform 225 simulated driving tests using the driving simulator, and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the driving characteristics which can represent the safety context. The results show that the safety parameters of driving are different when the length of OSMS and the traffic flow are different. When the traffic flow is low or moderate, the OSMS length can significantly affect the speed of the vehicle and the maximum values of time to collision. The higher the traffic flow, the smaller the minimum values of time headway. As the length of the OSMS decreases, the vehicles are more generally concentrated at the end of the opening area with the minimum values of time headway. The study also found that when the traffic volume is high, the impact of the OSMS length on driving performance will be weakened. In addition, the OSMS length and the traffic flow have little impact on driving comfort. Additionally, when the traffic flow is low or moderate, the opening length can significantly affect the driving behavior and safety of the vehicle. However, when the traffic volume is high, the impact of the opening length on them will be relatively weakened to some extent. Therefore, it is advised that in the case of freeways with large traffic volume, merely extending the length of the opening section does not necessarily optimize safety. Rather, the actual traffic density of the road should be carefully considered before a design length is adopted.

This paper presents an evaluation of the effectiveness of two types of deceleration markings on freeways in China: fishbone-shaped (FS) markings and edge-rate (ER) markings. An actual 4-lane, 6-km long freeway in Province Hebei was created in a driving simulator and used for the experiments. Three scenarios of deceleration markings were adopted: one without markings, one with FS markings, and the third with ER markings. For each scenario, three traffic flow levels were adopted (low, medium, and heavy). The appropriate dimensions of deceleration markings were first established using relevant design guidelines and then used to develop the simulation scenarios using Multigen Creator software. Sixty drivers carried out the simulation experiments with eye tracker equipment. The adequacy of deceleration markings was analyzed with respect to speed, perceived distance, pupil diameter, and geometric parameters. The results showed that both types of deceleration markings made a certain effect on vehicle speed, drivers'visual behavior, and mental characteristics. However, the effect of the FS markings was more pronounced than that of the ER marking. Specifically, the FS markings showed a speed reduction of 12.3 km/h to 15.2 km/h and a perceived distance of 70 m to 90 m, compared with 6.7 km/h to 9.9 km/h and 40 m to 60 m, respectively, for the ER markings. Application comments of the results are provided in the conclusion.

Ensuring access to healthcare in emergency health situations is a persistent concern for health system planners. Emergency services, including critical care units for severe burns and coronary events, are amongst those for which travel time is the most crucial, potentially making a difference between life and death. Although it is generally assumed that access to healthcare is not an issue in densely populated urban areas due to short distances, we prove otherwise by applying improved methods of assessing accessibility to emergency services by the urban poor that take traffic variability into account. Combining unique data on emergency health service locations, traffic flow variability and informal settlements boundaries, we generated time-cost based service areas to assess the extent to which emergency health services are reachable by urban slum dwellers when realistic traffic conditions and their variability in time are considered. Variability in traffic congestion is found to have significant impact on the measurement of timely access to, and availability of, healthcare services for slum populations. While under moderate traffic conditions all slums in Dhaka City are within 60-minutes travel time from an emergency service, in congested traffic conditions only 63% of the city's slum population is within 60-minutes reach of most emergency services, and only 32% are within 60-minutes reach of a Burn Unit. Moreover, under congested traffic conditions only 12% of slums in Dhaka City Corporation comply with Bangladesh's policy guidelines that call for access to 1 health service per 50,000 population for most emergency service types, and not a single slum achieved this target for Burn Units. Emergency Obstetric Care (EmOC) and First Aid & Casualty services provide the best coverage, with nearly 100% of the slum population having timely access within 60-minutes in any traffic condition. Ignoring variability in traffic conditions results in a 3-fold overestimation of geographic coverage and masks intra-urban inequities in accessibility to emergency care, by overestimating geographic accessibility in peripheral areas and underestimating the same for central city areas. The evidence provided can help policy makers and urban planners improve health service delivery for the urban poor. We recommend that taking traffic conditions be taken into account in future GIS-based analysis and planning for healthcare service accessibility in urban areas.

Urban mobility is a vital aspect of any city and often influences its physical shape as well as its level of economic and social development. A thorough analysis of mobility patterns in urban areas can provide various benefits, such as the prediction of traffic flow and public transportation usage. In particular, based on its exceptional ability to extract patterns from complex large-scale data, embedding based on deep learning is a promising method for analyzing the mobility patterns of urban residents. However, as urban mobility becomes increasingly complex, it becomes difficult to embed patterns into a single vector because of its limited capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel method for analyzing urban mobility based on deep learning. The proposed method involves clustering mobility patterns and embedding them to capture their implicit meaning. Clustering groups mobility patterns based on their spatiotemporal characteristics, and embedding provides meaningful information regarding both individual residents (i.e., personalized mobility) and all residents as a whole, enabling a more effective analysis of mobility patterns. Experiments were performed to predict the successive points of interest (POIs) based on transportation data collected from 1.5 million citizens in a large metropolitan city; the results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves top-1, 3, and 5 accuracies of 73.64%, 88.65%, and 91.54%, respectively, which are much higher than those of the conventional method (59.48%, 75.85%, and 80.1%, respectively). We also demonstrate that the proposed method facilitates the analysis of urban mobility through arithmetic operations between POI vectors.

This paper focuses on the effects of vehicle gap changes on fuel and emission performance of the simulated traffic flow in the adaptive cruise control (ACC) strategy. Firstly, the close correlation of vehicle gap changes and the host car's behaviors was explored with the measured car-following data. Secondly, the correlation between the host car's velocity and vehicle gap changes with different memory steps was also explored to develop the nth car's optimal velocity function. Thirdly, a microscopic traffic simulation program was created for analyzing the traffic flow evolution process and approximately estimating the fuel consumptions and exhaust emissions. As a result, it was seen that vehicle gap changes with memory significantly affect fuel economy and emission performance of the simulated traffic flow in the ACC strategy, which can result in low fuel consumptions and exhaust emissions. This study is an incremental step forward for designing the control strategy of the ACC system.

How to effectively solve traffic congestion and transportation pollution in urban development is a main research emphasis for transportation management agencies. A carbon emissions tax can affect travelers’ generalized costs and will lead to changes in passenger demand, mode choice and traffic flow equilibrium in road networks, which are of significance in green travel and low-carbon transportation management. This paper first established a mesoscopic model to calculate the carbon emissions tax and determined the value of this charge in China, which was based on road traffic flow, vehicle speed, and carbon emissions. Referring to existing research results to calibrate the value of time, this paper modified the traveler’s generalized cost function, including the carbon emissions tax, fuel surcharge and travel time cost, which can be used in the travel impedance model with the consideration of the carbon emissions tax. Then, a method for analyzing urban road network traffic flow distribution was put forward, and a joint traffic distribution model was established, which considered the relationship between private cars and taxis. Finally, this paper took the city of Panjin as an example to analyze the road traffic carbon emissions tax’s impact. The results illustrated that the carbon emissions tax has a positive effect on road network flow equilibrium and carbon emission reduction. This paper will have good reference value and practical significance for the calculation and implementation of urban traffic carbon emissions taxes in China.

This paper presents the use of the Aimsun microsimulation program to simulate vehicle violating behaviors and observe their impact on road traffic crash risk. Plugins for violations of speeding, slow driving, and abrupt stopping were developed using Aimsun's API and SDK module. A safety analysis plugin for investigating probability of rear-end collisions was developed, and a method for analyzing collision risk is proposed. A Fuzzy C-mean Clustering algorithm was developed to identify high risk states in different road segments over time. Results of a simulation experiment based on the G15 Expressway in Shanghai showed that abrupt stopping had the greatest impact on increasing collision risk, and the impact of violations increased with traffic volume. The methodology allows for the evaluation and monitoring of risks, alerting of road hazards, and identification of hotspots, and could be applied to the operations of existing facilities or planning of future ones.

To deal with the conflicts between left-turn and through traffic streams and increase the discharge capacity, this paper addresses the pre-signal which is implemented at a signalized intersection. Such an intersection with pre-signal is termed as a tandem intersection. For the tandem intersection, phase swap sorting strategy is deemed as the most effective phasing scheme in view of some exclusive merits, such as easier compliance of drivers, and shorter sorting area. However, a major limitation of the phase swap sorting strategy is not considered in previous studies: if one or more vehicle is left at the sorting area after the signal light turns to red, the capacity of the approach would be dramatically dropped. Besides, previous signal control studies deal with a fixed timing plan that is not adaptive with the fluctuation of traffic flows. Therefore, to cope with these two gaps, this paper firstly takes an in-depth analysis of the traffic flow operations at the tandem intersection. Secondly, three groups of loop detectors are placed to obtain the real-time vehicle information for adaptive signalization. The lane selection behavior in the sorting area is considered to set the green time for intersection signals. With the objective of minimizing the vehicle delay, the signal control parameters are then optimized based on a dynamic programming method. Finally, numerical experiments show that average vehicle delay and maximum queue length can be reduced under all scenarios.

In developing nations, many expanding cities are facing challenges that result from the overwhelming numbers of people and vehicles. Collecting real-time, reliable and precise traffic flow information is crucial for urban traffic management. The main purpose of this paper is to develop an adaptive model that can assess the real-time vehicle counts on urban roads using computer vision technologies. This paper proposes an automatic real-time background update algorithm for vehicle detection and an adaptive pattern for vehicle counting based on the virtual loop and detection line methods. In addition, a new robust detection method is introduced to monitor the real-time traffic congestion state of road section. A prototype system has been developed and installed on an urban road for testing. The results show that the system is robust, with a real-time counting accuracy exceeding 99% in most field scenarios.

© 2017 Kuang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. In this paper, we aim to examine the relationship between traffic flow and potential conflict risks by using crash surrogate metrics. It has been widely recognized that one traffic flow corresponds to two distinct traffic states with different speeds and densities. In view of this, instead of simply aggregating traffic conditions with the same traffic volume, we represent potential conflict risks at a traffic flow fundamental diagram. Two crash surrogate metrics, namely, Aggregated Crash Index and Time to Collision, are used in this study to represent the potential conflict risks with respect to different traffic conditions. Furthermore, Beijing North Ring III and Next Generation SIMulation Interstate 80 datasets are utilized to carry out case studies. By using the proposed procedure, both datasets generate similar trends, which demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology and the transferability of our conclusions.

Understanding the characteristics of vessel traffic flow is crucial in maintaining navigation safety, efficiency, and overall waterway transportation management. Factors influencing vessel traffic flow possess diverse features such as hierarchy, uncertainty, nonlinearity, complexity, and interdependency. To reveal the impact mechanism of the factors influencing vessel traffic flow, a hierarchical model and a coupling model are proposed in this study based on the interpretative structural modeling method. The hierarchical model explains the hierarchies and relationships of the factors using a graph. The coupling model provides a quantitative method that explores interaction effects of factors using a coupling coefficient. The coupling coefficient is obtained by determining the quantitative indicators of the factors and their weights. Thereafter, the data obtained from Port of Tianjin is used to verify the proposed coupling model. The results show that the hierarchical model of the factors influencing vessel traffic flow can explain the level, structure, and interaction effect of the factors; the coupling model is efficient in analyzing factors influencing traffic volumes. The proposed method can be used for analyzing increases in vessel traffic flow in waterway transportation system.

Vehicle movements at signalized intersections should follow the guidance of lane marking arrows. Turns are permitted or banned depending on the existence of lane marking arrows establishing network link connectivity. Lane markings are the interface that joins consecutive upstream and downstream intersections. Traffic flows from origins to destinations across intersections should be governed by lane markings. In this study, conventionally fixed lane markings are relaxed as binary variables to be optimized by maximizing the green bandwidths. The proposed methodology is innovative in that it extends the lane-based design framework to incorporate green band maximization for enhancing traffic signal coordination. Path flows are controlled to satisfy flow conservations and to compile turning flows at intersections. With these turning flows as inputs, lane markings can be optimized together with the coordinated traffic signal settings. Path flows, path travel times, and path choices are evaluated through new linear constraints. For path travel times, cruise times along lanes and total delays at the ends of lanes are evaluated. The non-linear total delays are approximated by the proposed linearized delay function. The model coefficients are calibrated by network data as in a previous study. The problem is formulated as a binary-mixed-integer-linear-program and solved by standard branch-and-bound techniques using a CPLEX solver. To avoid non-linearity in the problem formulation, the bandwidth maximization approach is adopted instead of minimizing the total network delay in the design of the signalized network. A network with four intersections is provided to demonstrate how optimized lane markings can create efficient network link configurations. The numerical results are promising compared with those obtained in previous studies and show that the overall network performance can be improved.

The traditional U-turn design has significantly improved traffic operations for relieving traffic congestion. However, the U-turn diversion and merge segments still cause traffic conflicts and delays. In this paper, an exclusive spur dike U-turn lane (ESUL) is proposed with the aim of addressing the disadvantages of the traditional U-turn design. ESUL provides a separate U-turn lane to diverge, decelerate, U-turn, accelerate and merge without interacting with through traffic. The effectiveness of ESUL is demonstrated through a field data investigation, simulation and analysis with VISSIM software. The proposed design is evaluated in terms of three parameters: travel time, delay and number of stops. Compared to the traditional U-turn design, ESUL can reduce travel time by 29.15%, delay by 66.70% and the number of stops by 100% at most. The results showed that ESUL has better performance than the traditional U-turn design and could be implemented to reduce traffic congestion and the potential hazards caused by U-turn maneuvers.

The vehicle-pedestrian encounter at midblock crosswalks in urban centers is inevitable but the challenge to urban transportation planners is in achieving a balance between traffic flow efficiency and pedestrian safety. Vehicles are expected to yield to pedestrians who have a right of way at the midblock unsignalized crosswalks but, failure to yield causes conflicts that at times are fatal. This study investigated the effect of macroscopic factors on the vehicle yielding. Six environmental factors are considered: temporal gap size, number of traffic lanes, number of waiting pedestrians, position of pedestrian (whether on street kerb or median), traffic flow direction and presence (or absence) of monitoring ePolice. Video Data on six observed variables that influenced vehicle yielding was collected from 13 uncontrolled crosswalk locations in Shanghai city in the Peoples Republic of China. A Logit model with a 95.9% accuracy was developed to describe the vehicle yielding behavior. The results showed that gap size and number of traffic lanes had the highest influence on driver yielding decision and that drivers were more likely to yield if ePolice was present. The sensitivity analysis was conducted and appropriate recommendations on improving the pedestrians crossing safety were proposed accordingly.

Urban road congestions change both temporally and spatially. They are essentially caused by network bottlenecks. Therefore, understanding bottleneck dynamics is critical in the goal of reasonably allocating transportation resources. In general, a typical bottleneck experiences the stages of formation, propagation and dispersion. In order to understand the three stages of a bottle neck and how the bottleneck moves on a road network, traffic flow data can be used to reconstruct these dynamics. However, raw traffic flow data is usually flawed in many ways. For instance some portion of data may be missing due to the failure of data collection devices, or some random factors in the data make it hard to identify real bottlenecks. In this paper a “user voting method” is proposed to deal with such raw-data-related issues. In this method, road links are ranked according to the weighed sum of certain performance measures and the links that are ranked relatively high are regarded as recurrent bottlenecks in a network, and several bottlenecks form a bottleneck area. A series of bottleneck parameters can be defined based on the identified bottleneck areas, such as bottleneck coverage, bottleneck link length, etc. Identifying bottleneck areas and calculating the bottleneck parameters for each time interval can reflect the evolution of the bottlenecks and also help trace how the bottlenecks move.

Branch roads, which are densely distributed in cities, allow for the flow of local traffic and provide connections between the city and outlying areas. Branch roads are typically narrow, and two-way traffic flows on branch roads are thus affected when vehicles traveling in opposite directions meet. This study investigates the changes in the velocities of vehicles when they meet on two-way branch roads. Various widths of branch roads were selected, and their influence on traffic flows was investigated via a video survey. The results show that, depending on the average vehicle velocity, branch roads require different widths to prevent a large decrease in velocity when vehicles meet. When the velocity on a branch road is not high (e.g., the average velocity without meeting is approximately 6 m/s), appropriately increasing the road width will notably increase the meeting velocity. However, when the velocity is high (e.g., the average velocity without meeting is greater than 10 m/s), there is a large decrease in velocity when meeting even if the road surface is wide (6.5 m). This study provides a basis for selecting the width of urban branch roads and the simulation of bidirectional traffic on such roads.

Traffic congestion varies spatially and temporally. The observation of the formation, propagation and dispersion of network traffic congestion can lead to insights about the network performance, the bottleneck dynamics etc. While many researchers use the traffic flow data to reconstruct the congestion profile, the data missing problem is bypassed. Current methods either omit the missing data or supplement the missing part by average etc. Great error may be introduced during these processes. Rather than simply discarding the missing data, this research regards the data missing event as a result of either the severe congestion which prevent the floating vehicle from entering the congested area, or a type of feature of the resulting traffic flow time series. Hence a new traffic flow operational index time series similarity measurement is expected to be established as a basis of identifying the dynamic network bottleneck. The method first measures the traffic flow operational similarity between pairs of neighboring links, and then the similarity results are used to cluster the spatial-temporal congestion. In order to get the similarity under missing data condition, the measurement is implemented in a two-stage manner: firstly the so called first order similarity is calculated given that the traffic flow variables are bounded both upside and downside; then the first order similarity is aggregated to generate the second order similarity as the output. We implement the method on part of the real-world road network; the results generated are not only consistent with empirical observation, but also provide useful insights.

This empirical study sheds light on the spatial correlation of traffic links under different traffic regimes. We mimic the behavior of real traffic by pinpointing the spatial correlation between 140 freeway traffic links in a major sub-network of the Minneapolis-St. Paul freeway system with a grid-like network topology. This topology enables us to juxtapose the positive and negative correlation between links, which has been overlooked in short-term traffic forecasting models. To accurately and reliably measure the correlation between traffic links, we develop an algorithm that eliminates temporal trends in three dimensions: (1) hourly dimension, (2) weekly dimension, and (3) system dimension for each link. The spatial correlation of traffic links exhibits a stronger negative correlation in rush hours, when congestion affects route choice. Although this correlation occurs mostly in parallel links, it is also observed upstream, where travelers receive information and are able to switch to substitute paths. Irrespective of the time-of-day and day-of-week, a strong positive correlation is witnessed between upstream and downstream links. This correlation is stronger in uncongested regimes, as traffic flow passes through consecutive links more quickly and there is no congestion effect to shift or stall traffic. The extracted spatial correlation structure can augment the accuracy of short-term traffic forecasting models.

As a typical self-driven many-particle system far from equilibrium, traffic flow exhibits diverse fascinating non-equilibrium phenomena, most of which are closely related to traffic flow stability and specifically the growth/dissipation pattern of disturbances. However, the traffic theories have been controversial due to a lack of precise traffic data. We have studied traffic flow from a new perspective by carrying out large-scale car-following experiment on an open road section, which overcomes the intrinsic deficiency of empirical observations. The experiment has shown clearly the nature of car-following, which runs against the traditional traffic flow theory. Simulations show that by removing the fundamental notion in the traditional car-following models and allowing the traffic state to span a two-dimensional region in velocity-spacing plane, the growth pattern of disturbances has changed qualitatively and becomes qualitatively or even quantitatively in consistent with that observed in the experiment., 24 pages, 7 figures

A water traffic system is a huge, nonlinear, complex system, and its stability is affected by various factors. Water traffic accidents can be considered to be a kind of mutation of a water traffic system caused by the coupling of multiple navigational environment factors. In this study, the catastrophe theory, principal component analysis (PCA), and multivariate statistics are integrated to establish a situation recognition model for a navigational environment with the aim of performing a quantitative analysis of the situation of this environment via the extraction and classification of its key influencing factors; in this model, the natural environment and traffic environment are considered to be two control variables. The Three Gorges Reservoir area of the Yangtze River is considered as an example, and six critical factors, i.e., the visibility, wind, current velocity, route intersection, channel dimension, and traffic flow, are classified into two principal components: the natural environment and traffic environment. These two components are assumed to have the greatest influence on the navigation risk. Then, the cusp catastrophe model is employed to identify the safety situation of the regional navigational environment in the Three Gorges Reservoir area. The simulation results indicate that the situation of the navigational environment of this area is gradually worsening from downstream to upstream.

We analyze the passengers' traffic pattern for 1.58 million taxi trips of Shanghai, China. By employing the non-negative matrix factorization and optimization methods, we find that, people travel on workdays mainly for three purposes: commuting between home and workplace, traveling from workplace to workplace, and others such as leisure activities. Therefore, traffic flow in one area or between any pair of locations can be approximated by a linear combination of three basis flows, corresponding to the three purposes respectively. We name the coefficients in the linear combination as traffic powers, each of which indicates the strength of each basis flow. The traffic powers on different days are typically different even for the same location, due to the uncertainty of the human motion. Therefore, we provide a probability distribution function for the relative deviation of the traffic power. This distribution function is in terms of a series of functions for normalized binomial distributions. It can be well explained by statistical theories and is verified by empirical data. These findings are applicable in predicting the road traffic, tracing the traffic pattern and diagnosing the traffic related abnormal events. These results can also be used to infer land uses of urban area quite parsimoniously.

Large-scale daily commuting data were combined with detailed geographical information system (GIS) data to analyze the loss of transport efficiency caused by drivers’ uncoordinated routing in urban road networks. We used Price of Anarchy (POA) to quantify the loss of transport efficiency and found that both volume and distribution of human mobility demand determine the POA. In order to reduce POA, a small number of highways require considerable decreases in traffic, and their neighboring arterial roads need to attract more traffic. The magnitude of the adjustment in traffic flow can be estimated using the fundamental measure traffic flow only, which is widely available and easy to collect. Surprisingly, the most congested roads or the roads with largest traffic flow were not those requiring the most reduction of traffic. This study can offer guidance for the optimal control of urban traffic and facilitate improvements in the efficiency of transport networks.