Abstract
A neighboring lane’s vehicles are potentially important influence factors of traffic safety. In fog weather, drivers will automatically imitate the behaviors demonstrated by other vehicles in the neighboring lane. To illustrate the effect of the imitation phenomenon on traffic safety, this paper develops an extended two-lane car-following model in fog weather. Numerical simulations are carried out to study the effect of imitation on multiple-vehicle collision induced by a sudden stop, as well as perturbation propagation when a small perturbation is added to the uniform traffic flow. The results indicate that the number of collisions depends on the influence coefficient of neighboring lane’s vehicles, sensitivity, headway and initial velocity. Furthermore, the number of crumpled vehicles decreases when the imitation phenomenon is taken into account. In addition, lower vehicular velocity in the neighboring lane can reduce the magnitude of acceleration and fluctuation of headway. The perturbation can be absorbed under certain given conditions regarding the imitation phenomenon. Therefore, traffic safety can be improved by considering the effect of the imitation phenomenon on two-lane traffic flow in fog weather. The findings in this study can provide a theoretical reference for the development of multi-lane intermittent release measures in fog weather.
Highlights
Traffic accidents are a significant threat to public health in every country [1]
The trajectories are obtained by plotting the velocity against the headway at time t, where α = 1.0, N1 = 100, the initial velocity in Lane 1 is vini = 40 km/h, and the initial velocity in Lane 2 is determined by Equation (2)
Compared to the car-following model [26], the new model in this study is extended to the two-lane situation, which is previous single-lane car-following model [26], the new model in this study is extended to the more practical and serves as a tool to study the effect of driver behavior on two-lane traffic safety
Summary
Fog is a dangerous weather condition, which could contribute to a considerable number of traffic accidents. In China, about 25 percent of traffic accidents on the Shanghai-Nanjing freeway are fog-related [3]. Traffic safety problems in fog have received much attention recently [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Drivers demonstrate the risk behavior of shortening the space headway in one-lane and two-lane traffic systems due to cognitive limitations, resulting in an increase in the probability of rear-end crashes [4,5,6,7,8,9]
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