Social Loss Analysis Approach of Traffic Congestion from Traffic Flow Monitoring in India

This paper describes new traffic congestion analysis method challenge by social loss calculation based on actual traffic flow monitoring data in India. This actual monitoring data is collected in one of typical major city of India, where it is Ahmedabad city in Guj arat state and one of most growing cities in India. Traffic congestion is always big issues in developing counties like in India. Therefore, it is important to understand how much this traffic congestion generates impact to their life. There are several ways to measure social impact such as waste of time for commute, un-necessary fuel consumption, and air pollution and so on. In this paper, it takes a social loss which is calculated as the gap between the traffic demand and the capacity which means infrastructure supply. This social loss has potential for impact parameter of traffic congestion. In order to calculate the social loss, it is necessary to have clear traffic parameter about the traffic demand data, traffic supply data, and infrastructure cost for traffic improvement. It is not easy to get those data especially tin developing countries. This paper shows how to get traffic parameter from the actual monitoring data and how to calculate traffic social loss from this data. And as summary, this calculated social loss is valid especially for comparing the traffic congestion condition in each location. This new traffic congestion analysis by social loss is authorized by the traffic flow theory but it is the first time to bring new method for the developing countries where there are so many unknown traffic flow parameter