Using Least Cost Path Analysis to Plan a New Bypass Route on Highway 401 to Mitigate Traffic Congestion and Impacts in the City of Toronto, Ontario

EasyChair Preprint 10124

Abstract

Transit infrastructure development is a major necessity in Canada’s largest city and the capital of Ontario, Toronto. As one of the busiest highways in North America and the backbone of Toronto's transportation and distribution system, provincial Highway 401, carries over 416 thousand annual average daily traffic (AADT) and plays an important role in the Ontario southern road network (You et al., 2017). With economic development and ongoing urbanization, the increasing regional population brings up traffic congestion in the system, especially during peak hours. The existing transportation condition has proved a bottleneck under the ongoing globalization & increasing population in the city. To mitigate the congestion, this paper proposed a new bypass route plan on Highway 401 by combining the least cost path analysis (LCPA) and multiple-criteria evaluation (MCE).

Keyphrases: Geographic Information System, Least Cost Path Analysis, highway planning, network analysis, user-defined multiple-criteria evaluation

@booklet{EasyChair:10124,
  author    = {Kristie Hu and Jonathan Li},
  title     = {Using Least Cost Path Analysis to Plan a New Bypass Route on Highway 401 to Mitigate Traffic Congestion and Impacts in the City of Toronto, Ontario},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 10124},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}