Design Hourly Factor Estimation with Vehicle Detection System

Design Hourly Volume (DHV) is the hourly volume used for designing a section of road. DHV is also used to estimate the expected number of vehicles to pass or traverse the relevant section of road in a future target year. The Design Hour Factor (DHF) is defined as the ratio of DHV to Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT). In addition to high precision of predicted traffic volume, in order to design a roadway to be the proper scale, applying appropriate DHFs considering traffic flow characteristics and type of area which surrounds the relevant roadway is important. This study categorizes sections of expressway (Suh Hae An Expressway) according to their area type and estimates DHFs utilizing traffic data obtained from a vehicle detection system (VDS). This study shows that DHFs calculated using VDS data are different from those using traffic data acquired from a coverage survey. While AADTs from both data show similar values, peak hour volumes from both data show significant differences especially for recreational areas. DHFs from the coverage survey are quite different from the values provided by the Korean design guide or previous research results and DHFs for urban areas are higher than recreational areas. However, DHFs from VDS shows similar values to previous research results. The result of this study suggests that using VDS for estimating DHFs is more reliable than using a coverage survey.