Development of Combined OD Estimation and Traffic Assignment Method for Road Network Planning of Small Cities and Towns in Rural Areas.

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Small cities and towns in rural areas are dependent on local road networks and it is indispensable to improve those networks for promoting socio-economic activities. Traditional road planning methods are useful for designing highway networks of primal distributors, and the road traffic census such as car OD survey provides fundamental data for those types of planning. However, the census data are always suitable for small cities and towns in rural areas. This size of a traffic zone in a city may not be consistent with a survey zone. Analytical methods available for small cities and towns have not been studied.This research project aims to develop an analytical method for describing and estimating network traffic flows in local cities in order to support road network planning precess. Main research topics are two folds. At first, the OD estimation model using link traffic counts is improved for transferring the OD matrix observed by the road traffic census into a detailed OD matrix which is consistent with the zone size of a city. Secondly, the two stage traffic assignment method empirically used in practice is reformulated for estimating through traffic in a city. The combined OD estimation and traffic assignment method is applied to the networks in Saijo and Niihama cities of Ehime Prefecture. Through numerical examples, it is found that the performance of the proposed methods is promising for road network planning in rural cities and towns without rich traffic survey data.