Evaluating Traffic Congestion Using the Traffic Occupancy and Speed Distribution Relationship: An Application of Bayesian Dirichlet Process Mixtures of Generalized Linear Model

Accurate classification and prediction of future traffic conditions are essential for developing effective strategies for congestion mitigation on the highway systems. Speed distribution is one of the traffic stream parameters, which has been used to quantify the traffic conditions. Previous studies have shown that multi-modal probability distribution of speeds gives excellent results when simultaneously evaluating congested and free-flow traffic conditions. However, most of these previous analytical studies do not incorporate the influencing factors in characterizing these conditions. This study evaluates the impact of traffic occupancy on the multi-state speed distribution using the Bayesian Dirichlet Process Mixtures of Generalized Linear Models (DPM-GLM). Further, the study estimates the speed cut-point values of traffic states, which separate them into homogeneous groups using Bayesian change-point detection (BCD) technique. The study used 2015 archived one-year traffic data collected on Florida’s Interstate 295 freeway corridor. Information criteria results revealed three traffic states, which were identified as free-flow, transitional flow condition (congestion onset/offset), and the congested condition. The findings of the DPM-GLM indicated that in all estimated states, the traffic speed decreases when traffic occupancy increases. Comparison of the influence of traffic occupancy between traffic states showed that traffic occupancy has more impact on the free-flow and the congested state than on the transitional flow condition. With respect to estimating the threshold speed value, the results of the BCD model revealed promising findings in characterizing levels of traffic congestion.

An application of Bayesian multilevel model to evaluate variations in stochastic and dynamic transition of traffic conditions

This study seeks to investigate the variations associated with lane lateral locations and days of the week in the stochastic and dynamic transition of traffic regimes(DTTR).In the proposed analysis,hierarchical regression models fitted using Bayesian frameworks were used to calibrate the transition probabilities that describe the DTTR.Datasets of two sites on a freeway facility located in Jacksonville,Florida,were selected for the analysis.The traffic speed thresholds to define traffic regimes were estimated using the Gaussian mixture model(GMM).The GMM revealed that two and three regimes were adequate mixture components for estimating the traffic speed distributions for Site 1 and 2 datasets,respectively.The results of hierarchical regression models show that there is considerable evidence that there are heterogeneity characteristics in the DTTR associated with lateral lane locations.In particular,the hierarchical regressions reveal that the breakdown process is more affected by the variations compared to other evaluated transition processes with the estimated intra-class correlation(ICC)of about 73%.The transition from congestion on-set/dissolution(COD)to the congested regime is estimated with the highest ICC of 49.4%in the three-regime model,and the lowest ICC of 1%was observed on the transition from the congested to COD regime.On the other hand,different days of the week are not found to contribute to the variations(the highest ICC was 1.44%)on the DTTR.These findings can be used in developing effective congestion countermeasures,particularly in the application of intelligent transportation systems,such as dynamic lane-management strategies.

Uncovering the influence of ChatGPT's prompts on traffic safety information using text mining approach

ChatGPT has emerged as a promising advanced large language model that needs prompt to gain information.However,designing a good prompt is not an easy task for many end-users.Therefore,this study intends to determine the amount of information gained because of varied amounts of information in the prompt.This study used two types of prompts,initial and improved,to query the introduction sections of 327 highly cited articles on traffic safety.The queried introduction sections were then matched with the corresponding human-written introduction sections from the same articles.Similarity tests and text network analysis were used to understand the level of similarities and the content of ChatGPT-generated and human-written introductions.The findings indicate the improved prompts,which have the addition of generic persona and information about the citations and references,changed the ChatGPT's output insignificantly.While the perfect similar contents are supposed to have a 1.0 similarity score,the initial and improved prompt's introduction materials have average similarity scores of 0.5387 and 0.5567,respectively.Further,the content analysis revealed that themes such as statistics,trends,safety measures,and safety technologies are more likely to have high similarity scores,irrespective of the amount of information provided in the prompt.On the other hand,themes such as human behavior,policy and regulations,public perception,and emerging technologies require a detailed level of information in their prompt to produce materials that are close to human-written materials.The prompt engineers can use the findings to evaluate their outputs and improve their prompting skills.

Incorporating travel time reliability in predicting the likelihood of severe crashes on arterial highways using non-parametric random-effect regression

Travel time reliability(TTR) modeling has gain attention among researchers’ due to its ability to represent road user satisfaction as well as providing a predictability of a trip travel time.Despite this significant effort,its impact on the severity of a crash is not well explored.This study analyzes the effect of TTR and other variables on the probability of the crash severity occurring on arterial roads.To address the unobserved heterogeneity problem,two random-effect regressions were applied;the Dirichlet random-effect(DRE)and the traditional random-effect(TRE) logistic regression.The difference between the two models is that the random-effect in the DRE is non-parametrically specified while in the TRE model is parametrically specified.The Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations were adopted to infer the parameters’ posterior distributions of the two developed models.Using four-year police-reported crash data and travel speeds from Northeast Florida,the analysis of goodness-of-fit found the DRE model to best fit the data.Hence,it was used in studying the influence of TTR and other variables on crash severity.The DRE model findings suggest that TTR is statistically significant,at 95 percent credible intervals,influencing the severity level of a crash.A unit increases in TTR reduces the likelihood of a severe crash occurrence by 25 percent.Moreover,among the significant variables,alcohol/drug impairment was found to have the highest impact in influencing the occurrence of severe crashes.Other significant factors included traffic volume,weekends,speed,work-zone,land use,visibility,seatbelt usage,segment length,undivided/divided highway,and age.