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216 Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities Practical Applications and Concepts for Transportation Data Analytics 217

10.7 Arterial Performance Management

Arterial performance management has become a very important subject area
within the transportation industry. Federal government legislation has placed
an emphasis on results-driven investments for transportation service delivery.
This makes arterial performance management a valuable analytics concept for
a smart city. The nature of arterial performance management analytics is de-
scribed in the following section.

Overview
The basis of the concept is to take the technique applied to freeway management
as described in Section 10.6 and apply it to arterial performance management.
Freeway and arterial performance environments vary considerably with respect
to average traffic speed and the expected variation in speed. Arterial roads are
subject to additional factors of complexity, such as conflict between mainline
traffic sites, rate traffic, and from pedestrians. Also, the spacing between inter-
sections in arterials is expected to be considerably less than that of freeways, and
while a freeway can be treated as a linear corridor, arterials require treatment
as a network of nodes and links. To address arterial performance management,
the same traffic turbulence analytic developed for freeways would be applied
to characterize the severity of acceleration and deceleration being experienced
by traffic along the length of the arterials. This could also be supplemented by
social media analysis to provide an additional perspective on driver perception
with respect to arterial performance management.

Analytics
As discussed earlier, the traffic turbulence analytic would be the primary tool to
be used to conduct the evaluation on arterial performance management. This
would be combined with traffic flows and an analysis of traffic speed variability
along the length of each segment to determine the technical performance of
each arterial. A user sentiment index would also be used, based on context-spe-
cific keyword analysis of Twitter feeds to determine the percentage satisfaction
of drivers along the arterial corridor.

10.8 Decision Support for Bus Acquisition

This concept was developed in discussion with a leading transit agency [5]; the
challenge of selecting the appropriate timing for bus acquisition was identified.
The purchase of buses to support regional and local bus services represents a
significant investment. Each bus can cost $300,000–600,000 depending on
the exact specification and the choice of bus. This represents a significant capi-