6.0 Identification of Missing Links
The road links that are required to carry the traffic between two places but missing in the existing road network are calLED missing links. Because of the missing connections between places the traffic takes a circuitous route resulting in heavy congestion on the few available links. By providing new roads along the desired direction of travel or between places of major traffic generators the traffic situation can be improved to a great extent. For identifying the missing connections between zonal pairs the prepared desire line diagram was superimposed over the existing road network. The superimposed maps were observed closely along the major O-D pairs and were checked whether direct links between those O-D pairs are available or not. If a direct connection is not available, it means that by adding one or more new links a direct connection can be established resulting in considerable reduction in travel distance between zones. The desire line diagram superimposed over the minimum path diagram was carefully observed and a few sets of missing links were identified, which are shown in Fig. 4.
The non-graphic data consisted the details of traffic zones and the road network. The non-graphic database was created using the inbuilt data base utilities. The database of traffic zones, which are the electoral wards of Calicut city, consisted of the population, number of employees, area, and road length per sq.km. of area. The non-graphic data of the road network consisted of the information like link number, starting node number, ending node number, length and volume for each link. These data were stored in sep
