A Comparison of Motorist Delays for Different Merging Strategies

D. R. McNeil and J. T. Smith
Additional contact information
D. R. McNeil: The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
J. T. Smith: The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Transportation Science, 1969, vol. 3, issue 3, 239-254

Abstract: Investigations of motorist delays at the intersection of a major and minor road have involved variations of one or the other of two merging strategies: (i) Miller's (Miller, A. J. 1961. A queueing model for road traffic flow. J. R. Statist. Soc. B 23 64--75.) model that assumes that a minor-road motorist makes consecutive decisions consistently, and (ii) that of Weiss and Maradudin’ (Weiss, G. H., A. A. Maradudin. 1962. Some problems in traffic delay. Opns. Res. 10 74--104.) that assumes that a different, independent decision is made for each headway. In this paper we show that results for both models may be obtained easily, using the results of queuing theory, if certain reasonable assumptions are made. Simple expressions for the Laplace-Stieltjes transforms and means of the delays are derived in the case of independent major-road headways with a common, general distribution. For exponential headways, a numerical study shows the mean Miller delay to increase with the variation in the merge times, while the mean Weiss-Maradudin delay decreases. To illustrate the application of the expressions obtained, we investigate the reduction in the delay achieved by inserting a traffic island between two streams of major-road traffic.

Date: 1969
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.3.3.239 (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:inm:ortrsc:v:3:y:1969:i:3:p:239-254

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().