The Impact of Emergency Parking Bays on Quasi-Eight-Lane Expressway Traffic Operations
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The problem with the paper is the scholarly contribution to knowledge. That has to be clarified especially in the abstract. Why do we need emergency parking bay on expressway? I can only think that either emergency stops or police patrol cars, so why bother examining the taper length at the first time and assessing that with high and low volume of the traffic? The traffic assessment would be much more suitable if the hypothesis made for public transport corridor where bus stops are necessary. More work is needed to discuss policy impact and managerial practice.Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
A straightforward technical exercise paper where the authors have explored the impact of the emergency parking bay on expressway traffic operations using one corridor in China. This paper has the following weaknesses:
First, based on just one corridor, it would not be accurate enough to quantify the impact. Also, the authors only considered eight-lane configurations. Furthermore, the majority of the findings reported are already known or corresponds to intuition.
Second, too many details provided regarding the experimental outputs without sufficient insights and discussion of the outputs. It is also required to present the exhibits in a paper which supplement the discussion. Figures 4 to 6 are very hard to see and do not present any interesting results from the experiments.
Third, this paper is very poorly written. A number of references are missing in citations throughout the paper.
Fourth, one of the major shortcomings of this paper is the motivation and contribution of the study. The first paragraph of the introduction just vaguely describes some information without proper reference or justifiable statistics. Also, relevant literature is not properly explored or presented in the manuscript.
In summary, this manuscript lacks the novelty and the significance/motivation of the study is not properly justifiable.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Interesrting presentation about the investigation of the level of safety and efficiency of the parking bay. The movement of vehicles in and out of the bay is significant, however it is important for the safety of the operation of highways.
The conclusions are weak and I propose the authors to connect the results with the same specifications of the design of bays.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The title should be changed into: the impact of parking bay use as quasi-lane on expressway traffic operation
I still find it tricky how quasi use of parking bays is an option for highway capacity increase?
but hey, I won’t stop the hard work done by the authors.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The authors explained further the contributions of their study. However, it is suggested to provide specific contributions as a list. By doing so, it would be clearly understood why this study is necessary.
There are still several proof-reading errors. Please do another round of proof-reading.
Author Response
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Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Figures 8 and 9 are hard to read.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.doc
