A Study on Characteristics of Vehicular Lateral Position on Rural Highways

Abstract

Many pieces of research have concentrated on traffic speed, time headway, space headway, and so on under non-lane-based heterogeneous traffic streams. In contrast, limited studies have been conducted for analyzing and modeling the vehicular lateral position. The lateral position of vehicles plays an equally vital role in the development of microscopic models. Moreover, the vehicle characteristics such as the lateral position and speed are considered independent in the traffic simulation modeling, ignoring their correlation. This study investigates the relationship between the lateral position of vehicles with traffic speed on rural highways. For this purpose, the traffic data related to different vehicles’ lateral positions and speed were collected using an infra-red sensor instrument from the National Highways in India. The relationship of vehicles’ lateral position with the traffic speeds under different ranges is analyzed to understand their dependence. The study results show that the relationship between vehicles’ lateral position is significantly associated with the traffic speed. The study findings help formulate a microscopic simulation model to reproduce accurate maneuvering in the traffic stream, which is useful for analyzing traffic characteristics.