A Comparison of Traffic Operations among Beijing and Several International Megacities

High-Efficient traffic system is very important for economy and society of cities. Previous studies on the traffic comparison mostly took a city as a whole, but ignored the differences among areas inside the city. But in fact, the traffic congestion in different areas with a city is mostly different. Taking typical mega cities like Beijing, London, New York, and Tokyo as objects, this paper makes cross-comparison in the traffic operation and performance based on intelligent algorithm. Transportation infrastructure and travel demand data are discussed and unbalanced transport system is found in Beijing because of the conflict between too much traffic demand and defect road networks. From the aspects of traffic load, operational efficiency and safety, indexes including traffic v/c ratio, average vehicle speed and accident rate are selected to assess the performance of road traffic. It is concluded that road networks of Beijing have the worst performance compared with other three mega-cities and the primary reasons are the inappropriate distribution of utilization rate among the freeways, arterials, and local streets, and the high traffic concentration in urban area. So, several measures are recommended to improve the operation efficiency of traffic in Beijing especially for the green intelligent traffic system. Keywords: Traffic operation; Operational efficiency; Intelligent traffic system (ITS); Traffic load; traffic safety; Intelligent algorithm