1. Instructor: Dr. Francisco Olivera CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
A GIS-BASED STUDY OF HOW THE HOT LANE IMPLEMENTATION IMPACTS SAFETY ON THE HOUSON KATY FREEWAY HOV LANE CORRIDOR
Instructor: Dr. Francisco Olivera
Submitted By: Lei Xu
May 2005
RESULTS OF ANALYSIS
ABSTRACT
This study examined the safety aspect of the impact of high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane implementation on the Katy Freeway high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane corridor using the GIS-based
crash data ( ) collected from Texas Department of Transportation. The Dynamic segmentation technique in ArcGIS was used to create the GIS-based crate data management platform. The study results indicated that the crash rate on the Katy Freeway HOV lane corridor had a significant decreasing trend immediately after the HOT lane conversion in 1998, while the crash rates on the other HOV lane corridors in the Harris County did not have decreasing trend.
METHODOLOGY
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The ArcGIS software is a very useful tool for the data management in transportation analysis;
Dynamic segmentation is especially useful in displaying the transportation data spatially;
There was a significant decreasing trend of the crash rate on the Katy Freeway HOV lane corridor after the HOT lane conversion based on the crash data from 1996 to 2000;
The crash rates on the other HOV lane corridors were not significantly decreasing;
This difference could be partially due to the implementation of HOT lane on the Katy Freeway.
It would be very useful to expand the sample size of the data.
It would bring a more reasonable comparison to integrate vehicle mile traveled (VMT) into the crash rate as a denominator.
DATA USED
Harris County boundary shape file
Source: Texas General Land Office website
Harris County major highway/roadway network shape file
Source: Department of Geography, Texas A&M University
Harris County control-section map
Source: Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT)
Harris County accident data ( )
Source: TxDOT TRF File
Routes Development
Dynamic Segmentation