Empirical MFDs using Google Traffic Data

Empirical MFDs using Google Traffic Data

Knoop, V.L. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
van Erp, P.B.C. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
Leclercq, Ludovic (Université de Lyon)
Hoogendoorn, S.P. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)

Transport and Planning

2019

The Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) describes the relation between accumulation and speed in a zone. While theoretically expected, empirical validations have been done with limited numbers of floating car (e.g., taxi) data, and loop detectors. This paper will verify existence, shape and crispness of the MFD using Floating Car Data (FCD) from Google. Due to the large amount of users (i.e., high penetration rate), this unique data-set contains traffic information with a high spatial resolution, a high spatial scope and high reliability. We use the data for 3 purposes. First, an MFD for the city of Amsterdam is constructed, revealing a strong relationship between the average density and the average flow. It also shows that the urban road network never reaches its capacity. Secondly, inhomogeneity is analysed. Traffic is well spread over the network, hence inhomogeneity is low. Moreover, if present, the inhomogeneity has only a minor effect on the flow. Also traffic in different directions is homogeneous. Thirdly, for the first time, an MFD is created for a whole country, which turned out to be very crisp as well. This suggests that small areas or a directional split are not needed to create crisp MFDs. That, in turn, implies that a crisp MFD is not a sufficient condition to apply control without considering internal dynamics.

macroscopic fundamental diagram
traffic congestion
traffic dynamics
Traffic flow
urban traffic

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4af54f06-e0c7-4584-aadb-4cedb18022f0

https://doi.org/10.1109/ITSC.2018.8570005

IEEE

2019-05-07

9781728103235

2018 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference, ITSC 2018: November 4-7, 2018, Maui, Hawaii, USA, 2018-November

21st IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, ITSC 2018, 2018-11-04 → 2018-11-07, Maui, United States

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2019 V.L. Knoop, P.B.C. van Erp, Ludovic Leclercq, S.P. Hoogendoorn