Abstract
In recent years, with the rapid development of China’s logistics industry and urban service industry, electric bicycles have gradually become an important means of transportation in cities due to their flexibility, green technology, and low operating costs. Because electric bicycles travel though motor vehicle lanes and nonmotor vehicle lanes, the conflict between motor and nonmotor vehicles has become increasingly prominent, and the safety situation is not optimistic. However, most theories and models of mixed traffic flow are based on motor vehicles and bicycles and few involve electric bicycles. To explore the traffic safety situation in an urban mixed traffic environment, this paper first uses cellular automata (CA) to establish a three-strand mixed traffic flow model of motor vehicles, electric bicycles, and bicycles and verifies the reliability of the model by using a MATLAB simulation based on the actual survey data. Then, using the technology of traffic conflicts and the conflict rate as the index to evaluate the traffic safety situation, the change in the conflict rate with different road occupancies and different proportional coefficients of motor vehicles is studied. In the end, the conflict rate is compared between the mixed traffic flow and the setting of a physical isolation divider, which provides some suggestions on when to set a physical isolation divider to separate motor vehicles from nonmotor vehicles. The results show that in a mixed traffic environment, the conflict rate first increases and then decreases with increasing road occupancy and reaches a peak when the road occupancy is 0.6. In addition, in mixed traffic environments, the conflict rate increases with an increasing proportional coefficient of the motor vehicle. When the road occupancy rate is within the range of [0.6, 0.9] or when the proportional coefficient of motor vehicle is between [0.8, 0.9], a physical isolation divider can be set to separate motor vehicles and nonmotor vehicles from the space to improve traffic safety.
Highlights
With the advocacy of green transportation and the increasing congestion of motor vehicles on urban roads, an increasing number of people have chosen electric bicycles as a way of travel because of their convenience and flexibility
Because the proportion of bicycles and electric bicycles in nonmotor vehicles on urban roads is relatively stable, this paper only studies the safety of a mixed traffic environment caused by different proportions of motor vehicles and nonmotor vehicles
It can be seen that in the state of a mixed traffic environment, the conflict rate increases with the proportional coefficient of the motor vehicle, and as the road occupancy rate increases, it tends to increase first and decrease
Summary
With the advocacy of green transportation and the increasing congestion of motor vehicles on urban roads, an increasing number of people have chosen electric bicycles as a way of travel because of their convenience and flexibility. Erefore, it is very meaningful to study the characteristics of a mixed traffic environment to better integrate electric bicycles into the urban transportation system of China. Mixed traffic flow is a typical complex system with high uncertainty and nonlinearity. The cellular automata (CA) model has been widely used as an effective tool for studying complex system behavior in mixed traffic flow research [1]. The NaSch model can better reflect the basic phenomena of actual traffic, considering the differences in the driving characteristics and the phenomenon of metastable synchronous flow in actual traffic, some experts and scholars
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
