Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley

This paper presents a simple approximate procedure for traffic analysis that can be described geometrically without calculus. The procedure, which is graphically intuitive, operates directly on piecewise linear approximations of the N-curves of cumulative vehicle count. Because the N-curves are both readily observable and of direct interest for evaluation purposes (e.g., they yield the total vehicle-hours and vehicle-miles of travel in a time interval, and the vehicular accumulation as a function of time) the predictions made with this method should be practical and easy to test.