Estimación de factores para la conversión de vehículos pesados a vehículos de pasajeros equivalentes, basado en los espaciamientos en una corriente de tráfico continuo, en la carretera bidireccional de dos carriles estatal E59 del Ecuador, Sudamérica

Abstract

The present paper exposes the results of the study carried out on the E59 road, located on the State Network in Ecuador in order to determine the passenger car equivalent (PCE) of three types of vehicles such us buses, single-unit trucks and combination trucks. The methodology used is based on lagging headways. This study makes use of video-recorded traffic data from three sites along the road. The recorded video clips were processed through software tools in order to get lagging headway dependent variable by type of vehicles and independent variables of speed, flow by type of vehicles and percentage of heavy trucks. Due to the endogenous nature of dependent variables a model of simultaneous equations solved by three-stages-least-squares statistical method was established. Founded on this model, the lagging headways per vehicle type was determined. The results are statistically significant for the equations of the model with adjusted coefficients of determination of 0.84 and p-value significance levels less than 0.05 for each coefficient of the explanatory variables. After these results, PCE factors were calculated obtaining 1.10, 1.12 and 1.21 for buses, single-unit trucks and combination trucks, respectively