A Comparison of Traffic Operations among Beijing and Several International Megacities

High-Efficient traffic system is very important for economy and society of c ities. Previous studies on the traffic comparison mostly took a city as a whole, but ig nored the differences among areas inside the city. But in fact, the traffic congestion in different areas with a city is mostly different. Taking typical megacities like Beijing, London, New York, and Tokyo as objects, this paper makes cross-comparison in the traffic operation and performance based on intelligen t algorithm. Tr ansportation infrastructure and travel demand data are d iscussed and unbalanced transport s ystem is found in Beijing because of the conf lict b etween too much tr affic d emand and d efect road networks. From the aspects of traffic load, oper ational ef ficiency and safety , in dexes including traffic v/c r atio, average vehicle speed and accident rate are selected to assess the performance of road traffic. It is concluded that road networks of Beijin g have the worst perf ormance co mpared with oth er t hree m egacities and the prim ary reasons are the inappropriate distribution of utilization rate among the freeways, arterials, and local streets, and the high traffic concentration in urban area. So, several measures are recommended to improve the operation efficiency of traffic in Beijing especially for the green intelligent traffic system.