IMPROVING THE LOCATION OF TEMPORARY PARKING SPOTS FOR TOURIST BUSES IN DOWNTOWN BEIJING
Open Access
- Author:
- Lin, Xu
- Graduate Program:
- Civil Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 19, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Sukran Ilgin Guler, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Eric Todd Donnell, Committee Member
Vikash Varun Gayah, Committee Member - Keywords:
- PARKING SPOTS
TOURIST BUSES
LOCATION
IMPROVEMENT
SIMULATION
VISSIM
ATTRACTIONS - Abstract:
- The mode choice of tourists around the world can differ greatly. For example, travelers within the United States tend to drive to their destination or rent a car locally to do sightseeing. However, tourists in China typically choose to use tourist buses, operated by travel agencies. Due to the excessive number of visitors in many scenic spots in China, the scenic spots encourage visitors to take group tours instead of individual tours since the group tours are easier to manage and arrange. Additionally, China’s car-rental industry is less popular and less convenient than America’s. As a result, tourist buses are commonly used by visitors. However, the large number of tourist buses within the central cities leads to many traffic problems. Tourist buses require parking spots on roadways to unload and load guests, which causes disruption to the traffic flow especially in the downtown of Beijing. Currently, the regulations for the parking spots for tourist buses is not well informed, and leads to large traffic jams and delays within the central city. To this end, the goal of this work is to provide general guidelines for regulating the parking spots of tourist buses within central cities, and as a case study use microscopic simulation to improve the traffic conditions in central Beijing by relocating tourist bus stops. The results of this work show that traffic delays in central Beijing can be reduced by up to 16.9% as a result of improving the parking locations.