When adjacent lane dependencies dominate the uncongested regime of the fundamental relationship

Balaji Ponnu and Benjamin Coifman

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2017, vol. 104, issue C, 602-615

Abstract: This paper presents an empirical study of the fundamental relationship between speed, v, and flow, q, (denoted vqFR) under low flow in the uncongested regime. Using new analytical techniques to extract more information from loop detector data, the vqFR from a time of day HOV lane exhibits high v that slowly drops as q increases. This curve arises after binning several million vehicles by q and only considering those bins with q < 1200 vph. A surprising thing happens when further binning the data by the adjacent lane speed (v2): the vqFR expands in to a fan of curves that decrease in magnitude and slope with decreasing v2. Yet each curve in the fan continues to exhibit uncongested trends, ranging from a flat curve consistent with recent editions of the Highway Capacity Manual to downward sloping curves. It is shown that this behavior was not due to the HOV operations per se, the same behavior also arises in the non-HOV period when the lane serves all vehicles and it is also observed at another facility without any HOV restrictions. This dependency on the adjacent lane is absent from most traffic flow theories.

Keywords: Traffic flow theory; Fundamental relationship; Flow-density relationship; Loop detectors; Highway traffic; HOV operations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2017.05.006

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