This project adopts a measurement-based method to determine congestion. A measurement-based method that can access a large set of traffic data in time and space offers the best approach to gain a good understanding of urban congestion, and subsequently an accurate estimation of congestion delay and other costs. This report also describes various methods that could be used to define congestion delay. Congestion is therefore defined as the delay, extra air pollution and fuel consumption when the measured speed is less than the reference speeds. The ARRB Congestion Model (ACM) was developed to calculate congestion with speed data from freeways and arterials. The model consists of seven steps and was successfully implemented on an Excel spreadsheet, which is downloadable by jurisdictions from the Austroads website to facilitate the calculation of congestion costs and sensitivity analysis using different reference speeds and unit costs. Some selected routes from Melbourne were used to illustrate the usage of ACM. Unit costs from Austroads and the Federal Department of Climate Change were used. (Author/publisher)
Abstract