EFFECTS OF PASSING LANES ON HIGHWAY TRAFFIC FLOW

Ruili Wang (), Rui Jiang () and Mingzhe Liu ()
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Ruili Wang: Institute of Information Sciences and Technology, Massey University, New Zealand
Rui Jiang: School of Engineering Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Mingzhe Liu: Institute of Information Sciences and Technology, Massey University, New Zealand

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), 2007, vol. 18, issue 12, 1865-1883

Abstract: In this paper, the effects of passing lanes on traffic flow on a single-lane highway are investigated based on a cellular-automaton (CA) model proposed by Leeet al.(2004) with periodic boundary conditions. A new driving strategy for the diverging and interacting processes are proposed by considering dual-time-headways (an interaction headway and a safe headway) as the criteria for a vehicle to select a lane or change lane. The proposed dual-headway rule has a clear physical sense and can be calibrated in the real world. We can see that (i) At low- (or high-) densities, there are no obvious increases of flux due to very weak (or very strong) interactions between vehicles. However, flux has an obvious increase at intermediate-density regions with the increase of the length of a passing lane; (ii) the space-time patterns before a passing lane are different from that after a passing lane, which is caused from vehicular reconfigurations on a passing zone; (iii) passing lanes can merge several narrow jams into one or few wide jams when increasing the length of passing lanes; (iv) if vehicles are allowed to travel with even higher speed, traffic can be further improved.

Keywords: Passing lanes; cellular automata; highway traffic flow; traffic flow modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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DOI: 10.1142/S0129183107011790

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