Table 10: Occupancy rates

The formulas of user delay cost and vehicle operating costs are presented in Equation (38) and Equation (39).

(38)

(39)

where:

is vehicle-hour delay in unit of hours,

and are the cost coefficients for the road users in PA, as given by FREEVAL-PA documentation. is 21 $/hr for cars/buses, and 26.2 $/hr for trucks. is 26.2 $/hr for cars, 127.8$/hr for buses and 159.69 $/hr for trucks.

Information on average occupancy for passenger cars, HGV and buses that was used is based on the FHWA Average Vehicle Occupancy report (2018) and summarized in Table 10.

Table 10: Occupancy rates

Vehicular Category Occupancy Rate

Passenger car 1.7 HGV 1.0 Bus 10.8

The calculation of user costs of delay in this report was based on specific estimations by using certain coefficients (e.g., coefficients representing relationship between travel times and delays over various hours per day). These estimations were done under the assumptions that are listed below. Thus, such a way of calculating user delay costs of delay may have some limitations when compared with the resource-intensive approach of modeling 24-hour traffic operations in an urban network.

To estimate user delay costs for arterial network following assumptions were made. Alternate values to these assumptions were briefly considered and will be assessed farther in the discussion.

1. 24-hour delay can be estimated based on information from a single PM peak hour by using delay coefficients. 2. The diurnal volumes are distributed as PennDOT suggests in their Traffic Data

Report (2019). Coefficients for volume adjustments were developed based on the previously mentioned report, whereas these can vary on daily basis.