On some experimental features of car-following behavior and how to model them

Rui Jiang, Mao-Bin Hu, H.M. Zhang, Zi-You Gao, Bin Jia and Qing-Song Wu

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2015, vol. 80, issue C, 338-354

Abstract: We have carried out car-following experiments with a 25-car-platoon on an open road section to study the relation between a car’s speed and its spacing under various traffic conditions, in the hope to resolve a controversy surrounding this fundamental relation of vehicular traffic. In this paper we extend our previous analysis of these experiments, and report new experimental findings. In particular, we reveal that the platoon length (hence the average spacing within a platoon) might be significantly different even if the average velocity of the platoon is essentially the same. The findings further demonstrate that the traffic states span a 2D region in the speed-spacing (or density) plane. The common practice of using a single speed-spacing curve to model vehicular traffic ignores the variability and imprecision of human driving and is therefore inadequate. We have proposed a car-following model based on a mechanism that in certain ranges of speed and spacing, drivers are insensitive to the changes in spacing when the velocity differences between cars are small. It was shown that the model can reproduce the experimental results well.

Keywords: Traffic flow; Car-following; Experiment; Model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2015.08.003

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