Which Factors Affect Lane Choice Behavior at Toll Plaza? An Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) Approach

Abstract

AbstractIn developing countries like India, mostly barrier toll plazas are present, where the approaching vehicle driver has to choose a particular toll lane for the transaction, whether it is a Manual Toll Collection (MTC) or Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system. Further, mixed traffic conditions prevail on the roadways in developing nations, and the same has been observed at the toll lanes. Dedicated lanes are present for different vehicle classes at toll plazas for a seamless transaction. The approaching vehicle driver chooses the lane, which causes the minimum delay to him/her and thus causes mixed traffic conditions at toll plazas, i.e., the presence of different vehicle classes in the dedicated lanes. Due to these mixed traffic conditions, the operations at toll plazas get hampered, leading to bottleneck formation, causing delays to users. Hence, it is necessary to monitor the lane choice behavior of the drivers’ at toll plazas to minimize his/her own delay. The present study evaluates the factors affecting the lane choice behavior using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and thus computes the most affecting factor for lane choice behavior at toll plazas under mixed traffic conditions. The factors are modeled using the user perception data collected in the pairwise comparison matrix as per the AHP scale. The factors considered for the present study are queue length, lane changes, Proportion of heavy vehicles, Proportion of trailers, and approach lane. It is also found that the queue length affects lane choice the most, carrying a weight of 0.32, followed by Proportion of HCV (0.28), while the lane changes (0.09) were the least affecting factor. These factors are helpful to monitor the traffic at the toll plaza to avoid the situation of congestion. Further, the AHP weights can be used with any Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method to form an algorithm of lane choice for connected autonomous vehicles.KeywordsAnalytical hierarchical processQueue lengthLane choice