Make a Set of Streets in a Transportation Network to be One-Way, to Prevent Congestion in a Special Region

Congestion in urban areas is a major problem and imposes huge costs to society. Congestion is a consequence of increased traffic flow in certain locations of large cities. Those locations are normally historical, recreational, or touristic sites, which attract a lot of people. Nowadays, travel demand growth rate has surpassed transportation facility supply growth rate. Thus, "predict and provide" is no longer a valid approach to solve transportation problems, rather Transportation Demand Management is a popular approach. A common method to mitigate congestion is to implement one-way streets. This method provides the ability to prevent congestion by managing traffic flow through network. The aim of this paper is to find a good selection of urban streets to be one-way, to prevent congestion in areas of interest. The selected streets should then carry the minimum through traffic and mostly serve attracted trips to that certain area of interest. Also, turning two-way streets to one-way should pose minimum impact on total travel time of the city network. Therefore, this paper introduces some indexes to identify important streets to be one-way. Next, different scenarios are made to combine variety of those selections. Total network travel time and the local travel time for the area of interest are then calculated for each scenario. Eventually, since we have two objective functions, we apply multi-objective decision making approach to achieve the best scenario. The algorithm is applied to Sioux Falls network and results are analyzed.