Effect of vehicular lateral gap models on heterogeneous traffic stream behavior

ABSTRACT

Vehicles moving in a heterogeneous traffic stream with no-lane-discipline maintain certain lateral gaps with the adjacent vehicles/objects. These gaps vary due to the static and dynamic behavior of vehicles, and the stochastic nature of the driver behavior. Majority of the studies consider the lateral gaps to be either constant or linearly varying . However, empirical observations suggest that the logistic curve model can suitably represents this behavior. Besides, it was also observed that the gaps vary based on the speed and type of the passing/overtaking vehicles and the overtaken/passed vehicles. Therefore, the present study analyzed the implications of different lateral gap models with the help of a cellular automata (CA) based traffic simulation model. The results indicate that, the logistically distributed lateral gap model closely represents the field observed macroscopic traffic relations and the selection of the lateral gap model has a significant impact on the estimated capacities.

KEYWORDS:

• Heterogeneous traffic
• lane discipline
• cellular automata
• lateral gap
• traffic flow modelling
• no lane discipline
• logistic curve
• Indian traffic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.