Abstract
One of the major challenges on Japan’s road administration is to utilize the existing road network and maximize its stock effects under financial and spatial constraints. In order to achieve this purpose, it is important for road administrators to monitor road traffic conditions every time and carry out necessary traffic management under the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycles. In the past years, such a constant traffic monitoring had been difficult due to some technical and financial limitations. However, ETC2.0 probe system, which has been deployed by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in recent years, is expected to make it possible to observe detailed road traffic conditions constantly in a wide range. Therefore, this paper firstly introduces the overview of ETC2.0 probe system and the characteristics of the probe data. Secondly, it summarizes how to utilize ETC2.0 probe data for analysing road traffic conditions and obtaining the various performance indices in order to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of traffic measures for “improving mobility and energy efficiency”, “making road traffic more environmentally-friendly and comfortable”, “improving safety and security” and “revitalizing local communities and strengthening international competitiveness”. At the end, case studies were conducted to demonstrate the analyses of travel time reliability as well as unsafe incidents (near misses). Through the case studies, it showed that road traffic conditions could be assessed more in detail by using ETC2.0 probe data.
