Projecting macroeconomic impacts on toll plazas: Br-101

The main objective of this book is to understand the behavior of vehicle traffic in a region impacted by macroeconomic events. It forecasts the demand for commercial and passenger vehicle traffic on the BR-101/RJ highway until 2020, using linear regression, with the support of the free R software. The explanatory variables used are the population, the region’s GDP and oil production in the Campos Basin. For the analysis, the data used is divided by toll plaza, type of vehicle and area of influence, which includes some municipalities. The simulation of the data using ARENA Version 14.0 software concludes that the number of commercial vehicles will increase significantly, making the waiting time in the toll plazas even longer, especially in Casimiro de Abreu, where the maximum time will be over nineteen minutes. To reduce the impact on stakeholders, the study suggests some measures for the medium-term planning of the highway, such as encouraging the use of electronic payment tags and increasing the number of booths for manual service.