Modeling Traffic Operations for Performance Measurement of the Port Mann/ Highway 1 Project

The Port Mann/Highway 1 (PMH1) corridor is the most congested route in the Province of British Columbia. Built in the early 1960s, when the population of Greater Vancouver was 800,000, it is one of the most important east-west corridors serving the region’s 2.2 million people, and provides a critical link to the Asia Pacific Corridor through the ports of Vancouver, ergo the Gateway Program. Most of the infrastructure along this corridor was built over 45 years ago. Moreover, many interchanges were designed using the design standards and traffic specifications of the 1960s and are not capable of carrying the current traffic demand and travel patterns. Therefore, the region is facing severe congestion, delay and mobility as well as accessibility problems. Hence, there is a crucial need for improvement to Highway 1 and construction of a new Port Mann Bridge. Furthermore, greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere are also severe threat to environment. Thus, the demand management strategy of expanding the HOV lane network on Highway1 for managing buses and commercial vehicles has been applied. As part of the evaluation process for determining the successful design/build/finance/operate consortium, the Province of British Columbia (Authority) developed a series of custom tools to aid in data exchange, processing of model output, and presentation of performance measures. These tools, in combination with the core PARAMICS tool, form the traffic modeling suite. A series of six performance measures, capturing both system wide and individual network components, have been identified. This paper describes how PARAMICS software was used to confirm that the PMH1 Design Concept would maximize throughput and minimize travel time as well as approach delay while meeting all specified target values for performance indices. Implementing the Design Concept will not only increase mobility but also decrease congestion and delay on network. This will permit the Gateway Program achieve one of its goals - to reduce congestion-related idling, which contributes to reduced regional air quality.