Improving Short-Term Travel Speed Prediction with High-Resolution Spatial and Temporal Rainfall Data

Heavy rainfall events are becoming more common in many areas with escalating climate change, and these events can considerably affect travel speed and road safety. It is critical to understand when and how rainfall events affect congestion in the transportation network to help improve decision making for infrastructure planning and real-time operations. This study incorporates high-resolution rainfall and wind data into a travel speed prediction model, along with other data related to weather conditions, incidents, and real-time speeds, to assess if localized rainfall data can inform travel speed prediction during light and heavy rainfall events, and how this compares with the classical method of using a single city-wide rain gauge data point. The travel speed prediction model holistically selects the most related features from a high-dimensional feature space by modeling by wind direction, correlation analysis, and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) to overcome overfitting issues and is applied to two urban arterials for case studies located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The results indicate that high-resolution rainfall features in many instances are better predictors of future rainfall on the target segments, leading to overall better prediction results (in 30-min lag time), when compared with models that use a single city-wide rain gauge. This has implications for other cities that are interested in improving travel speed prediction modeling and traffic modeling under increasing impacts from climate change and extreme weather.