Improving highway traffic performance: Merging pattern design of a departure zone after tollbooths or ETC

Binbin Chen and Wei Li

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2022, vol. 608, issue P1

Abstract: There are two kinds of traffic congestion at a toll plaza on a highway: Congestion in the approach zone and congestion in the departure zone, while congestion in the departure zone has received less attention. The performance improvement in the departure zone can directly reduce congestion in that area and indirectly increase traffic capacity in the approach zone by increasing the upper limit of the outflow from the departure zone. In this paper, we propose a method on merging pattern design in the departure zone after tollbooths or electronic toll collection, to determine the optimal merging patterns for the departure zones with two typical shapes (i.e., right-trapezoidal and isosceles-trapezoidal). Different traffic congestion simulations show that, for the departure zone with either right-trapezoidal or isosceles-trapezoidal, our optimal merging pattern has the largest throughput, shortest mean time delay, and smallest average number of stops per vehicle, among other possible merging patterns, in heavy traffic scenarios. The optimal merging pattern for the isosceles-trapezoidal departure zone is usually better than that for the right-trapezoidal departure zone.

Keywords: Departure zone; Electronic toll collection (ETC); Merging pattern; Toll plaza; Traffic congestion; Traffic throughput (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437122008093
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

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:eee:phsmap:v:608:y:2022:i:p1:s0378437122008093

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2022.128251

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().