Compliance of Access Management Techniques on Urban Arterials in Nablus City

Transportation services provided in Palestine are inadequate to satisfy both the current and increasing demand for transportation. Due to the increasing limitation of spaces and resources in most cities, there has been a growing trend in the management of the existing traffic system rather than building new facilities. Traffic management is a low cost improvement while constructing new facilities is capital-intensive and may be faced with the limitations of space and financial resources. The objective of this project is to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of some access management measures on two urban arterials in Nablus City. Proper evaluation was performed for Rafidia-Yaser Arafat Street and Faisal-Haifa Street. The methodology of this research is based on the following items: i) Review existing international access management processes. ii) Explain the functions and the importance of access management measures. iii) Collect the related access management data about the studied streets. iv) Select the steps, techniques, and adopt access management standards which suite the Palestinian cities. v) Evaluate the effect of these techniques on the street network. vi) Survey the public's opinions on drivers, pedestrians, and business owners on the two studied arterials, by doing face-to-face interviews with these groups. The access management measures that will be discussed in this research address the following areas: intersection spacing, driveway spacing, median treatments and median openings, turning lanes and auxiliary lanes, street connections, and parking management. The main results of this study were: • There are no specific guidelines or standards that are universally adopted for some access management measures. • The level of compliance of the arterials in Nablus City with access management measures is relatively acceptable. • It is difficult to apply access management measures on urban arterials, especially near the CBD area, where space is limited and the need for accessibility is high, while it is much easier on rural arterials. • Closing some driveways and openings or prohibiting some movements improved traffic movements and level of service, and reduce delay on the main arterial streets in Nablus City. • LOS for signalized intersections was improved from (D-F) to (C-E). The unsignalized intersections, which operate at LOS (F) were improved to LOS (C). After the discussion of the applicability of access management strategies, it is concluded that these measures can be applied on Nablus arterials. For the two studied streets, some measures are easily applied, others can be applied with limited geometric improvements, and some measures could not be applied because they need large space.