Urban Traffic State Estimation Considering Resident Travel Characteristics and Road Network Capacity

Urban traffic state is usually measured by vehicle average travel speed. It reflects the resident travel behavior on urban road network, and changes with the actual matching status of traffic demand and supply. In this paper, the traffic supply is estimated by the ideal carrying capacity, and the traffic demand is evaluated by vehicle traffic intensity considering resident travel characteristics. In this way, the network carrying capacity and traffic intensity are compared by equative unit. By introducing the intensity/capacity ratio, the matching degree between traffic demand and supply is determined, and the traffic state is identified based on average vehicle speed. In the last section, the 2005 field data of Beijing city is used to test and verify the proposed method.