This Report discusses the authors' experience of measuring the effectiveness of area traffic control systems in Glasgow, including the experimental design of surveys, automatic analysis of data and interpretation of results. A floating car survey formed the basis of most of the observations. A comparison between manual and automatic collection of flow data showed that both methods were feasible. Although a survey by aerial photography was not particularly successful, it was concluded that the technique could be used in some circumstances. A brief review of techniques used elsewhere is given. Although the exact criterion chosen as the basis of assessment of effectiveness varies, some function of the closely related quantities of journey time, delay and number of stops is always used. The floating car is the most widely used technique for obtaining the necessary measurements but more automatic methods have been tried. This Report was prepared for a symposium on 'Criteria for evaluating area traffic control systems' sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Hamburg. May, 1971. (Author/publisher)
Abstract