Citation

Jin WL. Transp. Res. B Methodol. 2010; 44(8-9): 1001-1021.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.trb.2009.12.014

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Frequent lane-changes in highway merging, diverging, and weaving areas could disrupt traffic flow and, even worse, lead to accidents. In this paper, we propose a simple model for studying bottleneck effects of lane-changing traffic and aggregate traffic dynamics of a roadway with lane-changing areas. Based on the observation that, when changing its lane, a vehicle affects traffic on both its current and target lanes, we propose to capture such lateral interactions by introducing a new lane-changing intensity variable. With a modified fundamental diagram, we are able to study the impacts of lane-changing traffic on overall traffic flow. In addition, the corresponding traffic dynamics can be described with a simple kinematic wave model. For a location-dependent lane-changing intensity variable, we discuss kinematic wave solutions of the Riemann problem of the new model and introduce a supply-demand method for its numerical solutions. With both theoretical and empirical analysis, we demonstrate that lane-changes could have significant bottleneck effects on overall traffic flow. In the future, we will be interested in studying lane-changing intensities for different road geometries, locations, on-ramp/off-ramp flows, as well as traffic conditions. The new modeling framework could be helpful for developing ramp-metering and other lane management strategies to mitigate the bottleneck effects of lane-changes.