Simulation of Exclusive Truck Facilities on Urban Freeways

This paper assesses the impact of exclusive truck facilities on urban freeway performance. A large scale regional microscopic traffic simulation model is developed for AM and PM peak hours and is used to model two alternative truckway configurations in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), including a truck only highway and a truck lane conversion on Highway 401. Demand inputs to the microsimulation model are generated by a regional transportation demand model which provides origin destination (OD) matrices for light, medium and heavy trucks and passenger cars. Plug-ins are developed to represent a truck only lane in the simulation. The simulation model is successfully calibrated to reflect observed road counts, and to produce realistic congestion patterns. The effect of infrastructure changes on travel distances, travel times, exclusive truck lane usage, and travel speeds are assessed. Microscopic simulation allows queuing formation/dissipation and bottlenecks to be represented, and allows for separate analysis of truck and car performance. Addition of a 4-lane truck only highway results in greater travel time improvements for trucks, and sometimes results in shifting of traffic bottlenecks on Highway 401 to downstream locations. Conversion of a freeway lane on Highway 401 results in increased congestion for passenger cars, but improved travel speeds for trucks. Both scenarios show truck facility usage ranges from 100 to 800 trucks per hour per direction.