Effect of On-street parking on Effective Carriageway Width and Capacity of Urban Arterial Roads in India

In developing countries like India, road side friction factors play an important role to decrease the speed of the vehicles and capacity of the road. These friction factors are on-street parking, pedestrians, bus stops and non motorized vehicles. It is a challenging task for traffic engineers to quantify the influence of these friction factors on the capacity of the road. This paper quantitatively analyzes the impact of on-street parking on six lane divided urban road capacity and effective carriageway width. The base capacity for six lane divided urban arterial roads is taken as 6000 PCU/hr from literature. Field data are collected through three midblock sections of six lane divided urban arterial roads in India. Study locations are selected with various degree of parking manoeuvres. All modes of transport presented in the traffic stream are classified into five different categories. The data from all the friction sections are pooled and the correlation is established between speed of a vehicle type and densities of all categories of vehicles with density of parking manoeuvres in their individual terms. These equations are solved for certain assumed values of traffic flow and parking manoeuvres. By plotting speed flow curves, the capacities at different number of parking manoeuvres are determined. Finally the impact of on-street parking on road capacity and effective width of carriageway is found out. This study shows that when the parking manoeuvres increases, capacity reduction increases and effective carriageway width decreases.