Nonparametric Method to Examine Changes in Traffic Volume Pattern during Holiday Periods

Rising standards of living and the trend toward shorter working weeks have led to significant changes in traffic volume during holiday periods. The challenge of holiday traffic has been reported worldwide in the literature. A comprehensive understanding of the changes in traffic volume pattern associated with holiday events is critical to many transportation engineering aspects such as traffic control; signal timing; road safety; and traffic volume monitoring, imputation, and prediction. However, existing research focusing on holiday traffic has been very limited to date, and the efforts made have generally been limited to a particular holiday period or a specific recreational area. A nonparametric hypothesis test method was used to examine the changes in traffic volume patterns caused by holidays. The data used in this study were traffic volumes collected from Canadian highway networks over the past 20 years. To illustrate the application and effectiveness of the proposed method, in-depth investigations were carried out with respect to the variation of both weekly and daily volumes during 12 Canadian holiday periods. The test results showed that, for various types of roads, this method is effective and easy to understand. Moreover, the outputs were informative and reasonable. This method also may be a useful tool to examine the variation characteristics of traffic during other special time periods.