Study of Freeway Traffic Near an Off-Ramp

Michael J. Cassidy, Shadi B. Anani and John M. Haigwood

Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley

Abstract: A bottleneck with a diminished capacity is shown to have arisen on a freeway segment whenever queues from the segment's off-ramped spilled over and occupied its mandatory exit lane. It is also shown that longer exit queues from the over-saturate off-ramp were accompanied by lower discharge rates for non-exiting vehicles. The explanation appears to be rubber-necking on the part of the non-exiting drivers. Whenever the of-ramp queues were prevented from spilling over to the exit lane (by changing the logic of a nearby traffic signal), much higher flows were sustained on the freeway segment and a bottleneck did not arise there. These observations underscore the value of control strategies that enable diverging vehicles to exit a freeway unimpeded. Key words: Freeway Traffic Control, Off-Ramps, Bottlenecks

Keywords: Highway capacity; Traffic flow; Traffic congestion; Ramps (interchanges) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-08-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/4mh8b630.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt4mh8b630

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().