Simultaneous Assessments of Innovative Traffic Data Collection Technologies for Travel Times Calculation on the East Ring Road of Lyon

Abstract

In recent years, many innovative technologies for the travel times calculation evolved, but have never been evaluated and compared to each other at the same time. These technologies depend on the kind of implemented sensor for the traffic data collection. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an original experimentation, which will compare several recent technologies of data collection allowing travel times calculation from Bluetooth sensors, magnetometers, Floating Car Data from GPS embedded devices and even inductive loops stations for speeds interpolation. For this assessment, number plate readers (ANPR) were chosen to provide the reference travel times according to their high traffic's identification rate (near to 90%), which is much greater than the whole of assessed systems, and also allows to reach an optimal representativeness of the traffic flow. This trial takes place in a 12 kilometres long segment of the Lyon East ring road, which DIR-CE is the road operator. The daily traffic flow is about 90,000 vehicles with around 10% of trucks. The East ring road of Lyon usually presents any kind of traffic density: free-flow, heavy traffic, regular 1 to 2 kilometres long end of day congestion. So, it will be interesting to test the swiftness of each of these new technologies for all of the various traffic conditions, especially during the fast transition phases of the traffic flow or even while the traffic is jammed and therefore when the travel times are high. There are five measurements test points along this itinerary and so four elementary segments. The installation of all the field sensors ended at the beginning of March and when all the systems will be in a nominal operating mode (actually, they are at present in a testing and settling phase), it is planned to collect data during at least three months, which will allow to build a large travel times database. Among these four road segments, one of them has neither entry nor exit, thus the penetration rate and the overall performances of each of these technologies will be able to be estimated with no disruption in travel time measurements.