Bretona Corner

School projects make for interesting things to post. This time, it’s the presentation from a class I took in traffic modelling. I started playing with the images I wanted to use in PowerPoint and I realized that it would probably be easier (and more fun) to just put everything into a video! So I played my in-class presentation from YouTube! The presentation is on the junction of Highway 14 and the Anthony Henday (Highway 216) on the southeast corner of Edmonton.

For the technical side, the video was put together using Microsoft PhotoStory 3 for the image sequences, the base map put together of screenshots from Google Maps in Adobe Photoshop, the music videos pulled from YouTube, and everything put together in Windows Movie Maker 2.6. I’m a little disappointed in the quality of the YouTube video, but I’m not sure how much of that to blame on the export settings I used in Movie Maker and how much is YouTube’s compression. Truth be told, it doesn’t look too bad at this size (as above).

The simulation was completed in VISSIM 5.10 using many of the built-in parameters, traffic volumes provided by Alberta Transportation’s 2008 manual turning movement counts (i.e. real world data), but I set the speed distribution to (cumulative) 35% slower than 100km/h, 65% slower than 110km/h, and 85% slower than 130km/h. I suppose I could play with VISSIM to get nicer output, but even if it reminds me of a ten year old video game, it’s fun to think I made it!

Many pleasant trails to you!