LAUSR

PurposeThe main congestion on roads occur during peak hours, apart from incidents such as road accidents and construction works. Although there have been studies on peak period travels, these studies have only implicitly considered weekday, weekend and road type in their investigations. In this paper, it is proposed to investigate explicitly, the effect of weekday and weekend travel variability and road type on peak hour vehicular movement which leads to congestion. A study of vehicular movement patterns during these times can influence and impact on planning decisions for transportation engineers.MethodsThis study utilizes structural equation model (SEM) to investigate the vehicular movements influence of weekdays, weekends, road type choice and car type on two peak hour periods 6 am to 9 am and 4 pm to 7 pm and one off-peak hour 9 am to 12 noon.ResultsUsing vehicular movement data from Radio Frequency Identification for Nanjing, China, for the month of May 2014, it was revealed that in most of the cases, weekday travels influence peak hour travels more than weekends and that off-peak hour travels for both weekdays and weekends show little variations. The study also discovered that choice of road type and car type, have varying influence on peak hour travels.ConclusionsThe high significance ratios of results prove that these chosen variables are suitable for investigations into peak hour travel pattern studies. The study has also proved the viability of this modeling method to investigate policy measures to reduce peak period congestion.