Capacity deterioration with elastic demand in road segment

To explicitly analyze the stability of traffic flow and the capacity drop, the paper develops a link traffic simulation model based on the elastic demand depending on travel time. The traffic demand decreases when the travel time is prolonged under the elastic traffic demand. The travel time lies on the traffic condition of road segment, and the traffic state is evaluated with the MITSIM model. The results show that the link flow will be stable under the natural restrictions of traffic demand and travel time. The unsaturated stable flow will reach the maximum capacity with the traffic pressure boost. The saturated stable flow will below the maximum capacity and the flow volume will decrease with the increase of traffic pressure. To avoid the travel capacity reduction, all the link capacities should be considered in traffic planning for the entire transport network.