Understanding the impacts of road closures

Goal

Identify road closures and understand how they impact travel times and vehicle pathing with the Origin-Destination tool. We’ll learn this by completing the Halton Borough Council use case.

Context

Halton Borough Council in the United Kingdom was interested in how driver behaviour was impacted by a month-long closure of Daresbury Expressway in September 2023. They wanted to know what alternative routes drivers were taking and how this affected trip times.

In August 2023, the month before the road closure, Path Analysis shows that the average travel time from along the Daresbury Expressway (between Chester Road and Mersey Gateway) was 4 minutes 1 second.

Do

Let’s re-create this use case, and understand the impact of the month-long road closure by comparing the date ranges September 2023 and November 2023.

Download this file and upload it to the Road Intelligence platform to complete this module. If you don't remember how to upload a ciot file, see the instructions here.

Now, it’s time to watch the video and answer the questions for Halton Borough Council.

Further Links

• Understanding the impacts of road closures on travel times use case
• How to use Origin-Destination to understand the impacts of road closures on travel times

00:00

Let's use the Road Intelligence platform to see how road closures impact drivers. First, we'll pretend we're part of the Halton Borough Council in the UK. We want to know how a month long closure on the Daresbury Expressway impacts drivers.

00:14

There are two ways we can start this study. The first method is open up the Origin-Destination tool, search for Daresbury Expressway,

Put in the date ranges for the month long closure in September 2023 and the month after. So November.

00:58

And add two paths which are the entry to the Daresbury Expressway via Mersey Gateway and the exit via Chester Road.Make sure the trip selection method for both is on passing through.Or we can just upload the CIOT file which you can download in this lesson.

01:27

Now that the results are loaded, we'll go through the interface to see if the closure had an impact on drivers. For this study, we'll ask ourselves did drivers take alternate routes and how many? How did travel times compare during and after the closure? And finally, how was travel time for heavy commercial vehicles affected?

01:47

So did drivers take alternate routes? And how many were there? In the Results Panel we’ll make sure that the date range for the closure is selected. So that’s September. On the map you'll see the Daresbury Expressway won't be colored or have an Edge Usage Ranking. This is also known as an EUR.

02:08

This indicates that there is a road closure. If we look at the map we can see network usage based on the EUR. Now we can try answering did drivers take alternate routes and if so, how many were there? The answer is yes. Drivers took only one alternate route. The second question will ask is how did travel times compare during and after the closure?

02:32

We can figure this out in the Results Panel. Select the September date range and in vehicle types, select car. Since we want to know about trips starting at Mersey Gateway and exiting through Chester Road, we'll look at the median travel time, which in September was 12 minutes. Now, if we changed the date range by only selecting the November date range, we can see immediate change on the map.

02:57

The red EUR line is now on the Daresbury Expressway. This shows us that the closure is no more. But to answer our question, how did travel times compare during and after the closure? We can answer this by looking at the median travel time again, and we'll find that it's dropped to 5 minutes and 43 seconds.So that's a decrease of roughly six minutes.

03:21

Halton Borough Council also wanted to see what the travel times were for heavy commercial vehicles or HCVs during the morning peak, when Daresbury Expressway was closed off.

03:32

For this, we'll set the results date range to the September date range again, but this time we'll set the vehicle type to HCV instead of car.

03:41

Because we want to see how HCV were affected between 6 to 9 am we'll go to the Mersey Gateway to Chester Road block here and click the Graphs button. Here we can view the trip volumes and travel times for the median and 85th percentile.

03:59

Looking at the 85th percentile graph. We can find out what the travel times are during the morning peak hours. Hovering over the column graph. We can see between 6 and 7am the travel time was approximately 10 minutes.

04:12

At 8am, the travel time was approximately 25 minutes. At 9am, the travel time was 100 minutes.

04:21

And that's it. During the closure we identified a primary alternate route by drivers, then an increase in travel time by cars by 6 minutes and saw HCVs experience longer travel times during peak hours. Just like Halton Borough Council, we could see how road closures impacted drivers and travel time. Now you can apply these skills to your own studies or try following along with this video.

04:41

You can get the download from the lesson. Just know that the platform is constantly updating its dataset, so results may vary, but the steps are generally the same. We'll see you in the next practice lesson.