Morning peak period travel characteristics of a residential suburb in Cape Town during a school and holiday period : what lessons can we learn?

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: It is argued that an understanding of variability is central to the modelling of travel behaviour and theassessment of policy impacts and is not the peripheral issue that it has often been considered. There is agrowing need to assess multi-day data to assess the distribution of user charges for road pricing, or patternsof public transport usage as well as improve the ability to identify mechanisms behind travel behaviour formodelling purposes.Drawing on studies worldwide, in conjunction with a review of the literature, the thesis first examines therelevance for using multi-day data, then discusses the methodology and results of a five week surveyundertaken specifically for this study, makes a comparison of the findings with that observed in other studies,and finally discusses issues relating to the application of the data and future research possibilities.Previous studies have shown that behaviour which makes up the daily travel pattern can be highly repetitiousin nature but that observing an individual's behaviour on a single day might not be representative of theirroutine travel and that this behaviour varies across demographic segments and driver gender.This paper examines day-to-day travel behaviour variability of a residential area, Summer Greens, located inCape Town (South Africa) using a travel dataset collected recently in November/December 2006. Thesurvey technique employed was the recording of numberplates of all exiting vehicles from 06:00 to 10:00,weekdays from Monday to Friday over a period of five weeks. A total of 5677 vehicles undergoing 44 743trips was observed and analysed.This research replicates and extends previous work dealing with day-to-day variability in trip-makingbehaviour that was conducted with data collected by Del Mistro and Behrens (2006) in Buitengracht Street,Cape Town CBD, in July/August 2005. The present research extends the earlier work by including departuretime variations as well as conducting the observations during both a school period (3 weeks) andconsecutive holiday period (2 weeks). Further, the thesis presents a method to measure day-to-dayvariability using the available data surveyed.This thesis finds a considerable difference in school and holiday traffic volumes as expected, but that despitethis, certain identical travel behaviour patterns (such as vehicle appearance frequencies, following weekrepeat proportions etc.) is observed during both these periods. It was found that the peak hour for bothschool and holiday periods occurred during the same time period and greater traffic volume variability wasfound to occur on Fridays during the holiday period than in the school period. Traffic volumes across allweeks appeared to decrease from Monday to Wednesday and 'bounce back on Thursday and Fridayconsistent with the findings of another international study.It was found that motorists exhibited more departure time freedom during the holiday period with averageholiday departure times much later than during the school period. Departure times were also observed togradually become later from Monday to Friday during both the school and holiday periods with Thursday andFriday departure times significantly different to the other weekdays. The proportion of unique vehicles observed was found to increase with time of day and the resulting impactof this on the effectiveness of Variable Message Sign (VMS) applications is also discussed. The researchconcludes by applying the findings to determine the impact of a hypothetical congestion pricing scheme ontraffic volumes.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University