Visualization and analysis of traffic flow and congestion in India

Abstract

The paper takes an analysis of traffic conditions in a developing country, namely, India. India is a country with a rapidly growing economy and a large market, and it has the second largest population in the world, which was 1.3 billion in 2018. India also suffers from environmental problems, such as air pollution and global warming that is contributed by traffic CO2emissions from transportation. In order to analyze this problem, a particularly challenging issue in developing countries like India, is the collection of traffic data. In general, developing countries do not often have well established infrastructure such as installations of small traffic signals, they lack new road construction and public transportation, etc. This study is the first real traffic congestion analysis in India and introduces unique traffic flow analysis such as: (1) Collecting over a month of recent traffic data in a major city in India, (2) defining traffic congestion from occupancy parameter based on traffic flow theory and observation data, and (3) using geographical special analysis (GIS) for identifying traffic congestion location. These three combination analysis enables one to identify the most congested area in the city with quantitative congestion condition. This study becomes useful to other countries that have similar issues.