TransCAD and GIS Technique for Estimating Traffic Demand and Its Application in Gaza City

Abstract

In the early nineties of the last century, the transportation system in Gaza Strip was born and new infrastructure projects, especially road networks, were constructed. However, the construction lacked efficient application of a transportation planning process. Transportation planning relies on traffic demand forecasting process. The conventional process is impeded by extensive amount of socioeconomic data. One of the most widely-used models which mitigate this problem is the TransCAD Model. This model is rarely used in Gaza Strip for traffic demand forecasting, and most of the practices depend mainly on a constant growth rate of traffic. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to apply this model in Gaza City for traffic estimation. This model estimates the origin-destination matrix based on traffic count. The traffic count was carried out at 36 intersections distributed around Gaza City. The results of traffic flow estimation obtained from TransCAD are assigned to the Gaza maps using the GIS techniques for spatial analysis. It is shown that the most congested area at present is the middle of the city especially at Aljala-Omer Almokhtar intersection. Therefore, improvement scenarios of this area should be carried out. The results of calibration of traffic flow estimation show that the differences between the estimated and the actual flows were less than 10%. In addition, network evaluation results show that the network is expected to be more congested in 2015. This work can be used by transportation planners for testing any network improvement scenarios and for studying their network performance.