A kinematic wave theory of lane-changing vehicular traffic

Frequent lane-changes in highway merging, diverging, and weaving areas often can disrupt traffic flow and, even worse, lead to accidents. For balanced lane-changing areas, where different lanes share the same traffic conditions, based on the observation that a vehicle has to take two lanes during its lane-changing period, we consider its contribution to traffic density is doubled. That is, there are latitudinal interactions between vehicles. Then, we incorporate additional effective density from lane-changing traffic into the fundamental diagram, from which we can clearly see the disruption effect of lane-changing traffic such as capacity-drop. With the modified fundamental diagram, we develop a simple kinematic wave theory of lane-changing dynamics, from whose Riemann solutions we present new definitions of local traffic supply and demand. In the future, we will be interested in calibrating associated parameters in the lane-changing model with observed data. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, 522 Social Science Tower, Irvine, CA 92697-3600, USA. Email: [email protected]