Traffic peed characteristics around speed regulating strips in NTU

• Main Author: Huang, Daryl Zhongxin.
• Other Authors: Fan Shing Leung, Henry
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Civil engineering::Transportation
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16018
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Harmful impacts of traffic are mainly speed-related and most of the time, lower speed usually helps to reduce such impacts significantly. Travelling at lower speed results in time increase for making the trip on the road, which some drivers may not do so and thus choose to violate the limits set. The speed limit in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is 40kph, but it had been observed that many vehicles do not abide by the speed limit, especially on long stretches of straight roads. Thus the roads are designed with speed regulating (traffic calming) devices such as speed regulating strips and humps to regulate the speed of vehicles travelling within the campus, especially near locations where pedestrians might have a tendency to cross the particular section of the road. For this study, the focus will be on speed regulating strips near Research Technoplaza and the strips on the stretch of road outside Innovation Centre Block 2 to find out the prevailing speed of vehicles around the speed regulating strips and, through paired comparison, analyse if the speed regulating strips has any effect, positive or negative, on the vehicular speeds. The vehicles involved in this project were passenger cars, vans and pick-ups travelling at free speed. The results that had been obtained reflected that the speed regulating strips did not reduce the vehicular speed in the two areas before-mentioned. Especially for the strips at Innovation Centre as the hypothesis testing showed that vehicles had increased speed instead of slowing down. Although the strips at Research Technoplaza did not reflect in a significant reduction of vehicular speed, the speed at which the vehicles travelled was considerably lower than that of the previous location. In conclusion, speed regulating strips alone will not be effective in making the vehicles on the roads to slow down and other measures, such as the introduction of road humps, have to be taken to slow down the vehicles travelling within the campus of NTU.