Simulating Impacts of Variable Accident Sites on Freeway Weaving Section Traffic Flow in Cellular Automation Model

Abstract

As a typical traffic bottleneck, the freeway weaving section is one source of vehicle conflict and an accident-prone area. This paper presents a cellular automaton model to characterize accident-induced traffic behavior around the weaving section, in which different accident sites are considered. The spatial-temporal profiles are presented after the numerical simulation. It is shown that the accident car not only causes a local jam behind the accident car, but also causes vehicles to cluster in the bypass lane. The accident occurring in lane 1 (the left lane) in the weaving section are more inclined to cause traffic jam and the decrease of traffic capacity than in lane 2 (the right lane). Furthermore, the curves of saturated flux of weaving section against different accident sites are given. It is found that the capacity of weaving section will decrease fastest when the accident is located in the downstream of weaving section.