The prediction of traffic peak shapes from hourly flow counts.

An analysis of five-minute traffic flow counts has been made for 166 peak periods. A normal function relating the flow to the time was found to give good fits to the data. Methods have been developed for predicting the parameters specifying this function from simple hourly flow counts. An algorithm is given which implements these methods and allows a detailed peak profile to be synthesised from a given set of four consecutive hourly flows. The primary application will be in traffic delay and queue prediction for road junctions. (Author/publisher)