2-A Daily Flow Profile of Traffic in an Urban Traffic.pdf

S. I. Oni, Charles Asenime, Emmanuel Ege, Kemi Efunshade, S.A. Oke
in an urban traffic corridor in Lagos, which is a commercial nerve centre of a
developing country.
JEL. Classification: D01;D11;H11;H41;H54;J20;J21;J24;L91;O18
KEYWORDS: Traffic Count, Urban Traffic, Traffic Corridor, Traffic Network,
Traffic Congestion
1. INTRODUCTION
Metropolitan Lagos has been described as the sixth fastest growing city in the
developing world. The city is highly populated with many problems such as
overcrowding (high population density), overstretched usage of facilities (roads,
schools, and health centers), inadequate electricity supply, and high traffic congestion.
As a result of these problems many inhabitants of Lagos metropolitan are constantly
relocating to previously uninhabited locations that could guarantee cheaper and better
housing as well as provide necessary facilities which are hitherto overstretched in the
city. Despite the movement of people to new locations some of these problems that
were avoided by staying away from the metropolitan start evolving up in the new
location. The problem of traffic flow is one of these important challenges that need to
be resolved.
For the less congested Iyana Ipaja/Ikotun area of the city, the traffic flow has been
challenging, leading to many hours spent in traffic jams. The challenge of
understanding this traffic situation, with a view of proffering solution is therefore
tackled in the current paper. In particular, traffic counts are taken along the Iyana
Ipaja/Ikotun traffic corridor which experiences very high volume of traffic. The
traffic count therefore aims at estimating traffic flow and its characteristics. Thus, the
study provides an insight of the type of traffic management system or tool to be
employed by traffic management agencies. This will ensure that traffic flows without
hindrance. In addition, insights into understanding how to develop a travel demand
management system would be gained.
What follows is a review of literature relating to traffic flow in order to identify the
important gap that the current paper fills. Yu and Shi (2008) proposed an extended
traffic flow model by introducing the relative velocity of arbitrary number of cars that
precede and that follow into the Newell-Whitham-type car-following model. Guan
and He (2008) investigated the velocity-density relationships of urban freeways. Hou,
Xu, and Yan (2008) applied the iterative learning control approach to address the
traffic density control problem in a macroscopic level freeway environment with
ramp metering. Baykal-Gursoy, Xiao, and Ozbay (2008) modelled traffic flow
interrupted by incidents. Zhu and Dai (2008) simulated the soliton and kink-antikink
density waves and concluded that the maximal current of traffic-flow increases with
decreasing of the safety distance. Wu, Sun, and Gao (2008) proposed a dynamic
traffic model (DTM) for routing choice behaviour (RCB) in which both topology
Vol.2, No.2:99-109 (Fall 2008) 100