Traffic Impact of the Greenfield Bridge Closure

Team: Sean Qian (PI, CMU), Wei Ma (CMU)
Funding source: Traffic21 Institute, Public Works of the City of Pittsburgh
Start/End time: 2015

The Greenfield Bridge is planned to close for reconstruction in October 2015, and will remain closed for 18 months. This bridge currently carries a great deal of traffic, connecting the Greenfield neighborhood to Schenley Park. Given that there are no easy detour routes, traffic is likely to be disrupted. The Greenfield Bridge demolition and reconstruction project offers us a great opportunity to study the real-world impact caused by pre-planned incidents, and more importantly, to prepare the public agencies in Pittsburgh to deal more effectively with infrastructure failure. This project investigates how the Greenfield Bridge closures could affect highway traffic, arterials traffic, emissions and fuel consumptions. Potential transportation management strategies will be evaluated and recommended. This research requires extensive data collection, simulation modeling that takes into account time-of-day activity features, travel demand changes, departure time shifts (peak spreading), and traffic re-routing.

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