Strategy to reduce queuing time at toll plaza

Abstract

It is observed that many of the toll plazas across India face congestion or long queues on one (major flow) side only, during some particular peak timing in a day or on weekend or during festival season. Long queues have been noticed during these particular timing on one (major flow) side while other (minor flow) side remains congestion-free most of the time. Thus, the lanes on the other side generally remain unused in such situations. This paper attempts to provide a solution to the above-discussed problem at toll plaza to reduce queue length/queue time on the problematic side. The paper presents the results of the reversible lane concept for collection of toll by optimizing the toll servers according to the demand from a particular side, resulting in optimization of queue length/queue time. The case study methodology is used to validate the proposed optimization strategy. The real-time data was collected from one of the toll plaza on National Highway 6. The analysis was performed using simulation and M/M/1 queue model. Simulation was adopted in the analysis to get a real-world situation by considering randomness in the field data. This model calculates the present and future values of parameters like average queue length, average waiting time of a customer, total time spent in the system, traffic handling capacity of each server and toll plaza. The result showed that the implementation of the reversible lane concept for toll collection reduces congestion from the problematic side and optimizes the queuing length/queuing time. Since the queue length will be reduced, people will not avoid the toll plaza because of longer queuing time, and the revenue generation will not be affected. Also, the vehicle will stand idle for less period of time, and the fuel consumption and vehicular emission will be lowered.