The Port Mann/Highway 1 (PMH1) corridor is the most congested route in the Province of British Columbia. Built in the early 1960s, when the population of Greater Vancouver was 800,000, it is one of the most important east-west corridors serving the region's 2.2 million people, and provides a critical link to the Asia Pacific Corridor through the ports of Vancouver. Many interchanges were designed using the design standards and traffic specifications of the 1960s and are not capable of carrying the current traffic demand and travel patterns. As part of the evaluation process for determining the successful design/build/finance/operate/ consortium, the Province of British Columbia developed a series of custom tools to aid in data exchange, processing of model output, and presentation of performance measures. These tools in combination with the core PARAMICS tool, form the traffic modeling suite. A series of six performance measures, capturing both system wide and individual network components, have been identified. This paper describes how PARAMICS software was used to confirm that the PMH1 Design Concept would maximize throughput and minimize travel time as well as approach delay while meeting all the specified target values for performance indices. Implementing the Design Concept will not only increase mobility but also decrease congestion and delay on the network. This will permit the gateway Program to achieve one of its goals - to reduce congestion-related idling, which contributes to reduced regional air quality. For the covering abstract of this conference see ITRD number E217481.
Abstract