Overview
Riga City is an important element of East-West transport corridor. Special place in Riga economics is occupied by Free Port of Riga, which is one of most efficient in Baltic Region. It means that Riga is an attraction point for freight traffic flow. At same time, Riga is considered as a city, which is friendly for tourists and citizens. Both aspects are important for sustainable urban development, but both contradict.
The main tasks of this project could be formulated as follows:
- to make freight and private vehicle traffic counts survey;
- to formulate freight and private traffic rerouting scenarios from city centre for 2014, 2015, 2018 years;
- to develop, calibrate and validate the model for scenarios analysis;
- to analyse different development scenarios and estimate level of service (LOS) according to Highway Capacity Manual.
According to the formulated tasks a traffic counts survey was performed in 19 points across Riga transport network. More than 40 volunteers took part in this survey.
The survey was hold during two working days (from 10:00-12:00 and from 14:00-16:00). During the survey different types of freight transport vehicles were taken into account. Collected data allows to do general statistical analysis and to use the data for transport model calibration and validation.
Funding
Results
Main results are numerical analysis of proposed scenarios. As global indicator of influence, average speed in networks was used. Also for some elements of transport infrastructure LOS level was estimated.
Other results
Final results allow to conclude that in general for effective rerouting of traffic flows from city centre all city development projects must be implemented. Currently changes in transport infrastructure will lead to increases of main roads loading level. From formulated scenarios most attainable relates to traffic flow limitation in 11 Novembra Krastmala fragment between Vant and Stone bridges for summer time. But this action should be synchronized with end and beginning of academic year in schools and universities. Also it is recommended to conduct annual informative campaign concerning traffic restriction in mentioned above area.