The Orlando - Orange County Expressway Authority (OOCEA) is currently executing an aggressive program to convert many of its traditional mainline barrier-style toll plazas to express toll plazas. These express toll plazas are configured with open-road tolling through the mainline lanes and traditional barrier-style tolling to the sides. Customers utilizing OOCEA's automatic vehicle identification (AVI) technology, called E-PASS, will continue on the mainline and pay the toll at expressway speeds. Cash customers will diverge off the mainline, pass through a barrier-style toll plaza to pay the toll and merge back onto the mainline. OOCEA sought a method of analyzing the operations of the converted plazas that would provide information on toll lane capacity, vehicle queuing and stops, quantification of vehicle delay, and a simulation of the operation including merging and diverging to the cash lanes. VISSIM, a sophisticated traffic analysis software package that is capable of analyzing the complicated operations found at these toll plazas, was selected. The VISSIM software has proved to be an invaluable tool for OOCEA throughout the toll plaza conversion process. This paper will present and describe a methodology that can be used to analyze the elements of traditional barrier-style and express toll plazas using the VISSIM software package. The paper also describes the benefits realized by OOCEA while using VISSIM during project planning and final design.
Abstract