الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
City centresare the heart of the cities where urban functions are intensively concentrated; Le. the social, cultural, business and entertainment activities.However, in many cities, worldwide, the city centresare highly congested. The reason is that the area traffic capacity(ATC) becomes constrained;Le. the traffic and parkingdemands (mainly motorized) are continually increase within a finite roads and car parks capacity. The ATCare limited by either the capacity of the internal road network, or the parking capacity, or the capacity of the approach roads leading into the area. One of these three elements limits the overall traffic capacity. Therefore, the main objectiveof this thesis is’ to develop a planning process which can be used as a tool todetermine the ATC and producing and evaluating different solutions (or scenarios) that can improve a central ATC, each scenario includesdifferent plausible improving strategies. These strategies may be divided into two main approaches. The first is traffic management strategies (e.g. co-ordinated traffic signals) which used to increase the traffic capacity by controlling traffic at intersections. The second is travel demand management hypotheses which decrease demand to the extent of ATC by controlling the movement of private cars in central areas (e.g. long term parking restriction, public transportation improvement and integration of long term parking restriction and public transportation improvement). The proposed planning process is based on a combined analysis of traffic and parking situations which result from the travel demand and traffic supply in a city centre. If the travel demand is greater than the area traffic capacity, the process reflects feedback effects of parking and traffic situations on the desired supply or demand. Thus, it can be used to analyse different plausible improving strategies, which might be needed to achieve favorable situations (formulating scenarios).The proposed planning process is then applied to estimate the ATC of Alexandria city centreand to analyse the impacts of applying some traffic management strategies and travel demand management hypotheses in order to improve the A TC. All required data are collected and analysed to estimate the travel demand and existing traffic supply. The whole area is modelled and calibrated usingthe commercial Software VISSIM 5.20 to analyze the road network data and identify its capacity under the existing traffic control conditions and to estimate the effect of applying some traffic management strategies (co-ordinated traffic signals system) on its capacity. The Alexandria city centre situation is estimated, the A TC is determined as well as the proposed strategies are applied and investigated. Thus, various scenarios of the proposed strategies are formulated and evaluated from both quantitative and qualitative view points.The comparison of the scenarios leads to conclude thatscenario 9 (public transportation improvements + co-ordinated traffic signals) and 10 (integration of parking restrictions and public transportation improvements + co-ordinated traffic signals) consider the best scenarios where they give the maximum value of Arc as well as the better values for degrees of saturation, but scenario lO is the best because, a lower level of development for public transportation facilities is required.
Keywords: central areas, area traffic capacity, traffic congestion, traffic micro¬simulation,planning process, traffic management, travel demand management.