Traffic arrival patterns on a cross section of a multilane highway

Abstract

The dependence of vehicle arrival patterns in adjacent lanes of a multilane, one-directional highway necessitates the use of models which simultaneously describe vehicle arrivals on the roadway (defined as a number of parallel lanes in the same direction). The assumption of independent vehicle arrivals may lead to inaccuracies in a number of important design applications. The model presented describes the sequence of vehicle arrivals in adjacent lanes as a Markov renewal process. Markovian properties provide adequate expression of the dependence of vehicle arrivals on the roadway. After a vehicle arrives in a certain lane, the tendency for the next vehicle to appear in the adjacent lane is greater than is the unconditional probability for such a vehicle in that lane. These arrival patterns indicate that the distribution of vehicles in road lanes is different from that achieved by splitting total flow into independent streams.