PLACEMENT CHARACTERISTICS OF MIXED TRAFFIC ON MULTI-LANE DIVIDED ROADS

Abstract

Roads and vehicles are primarily manufactured for longitudinal movements, lateral vehicle interactions are equally important for a traffic engineer. The width of the road is infinitely small as compared to its length, but multi-lane highways allow side to side movement of vehicles in adjacent lanes, or during changing of lanes. The present study includes the placement behavior of mixed traffic on multi-lane divided roads. Placement data of 5 min interval at seven sections of four-lane and four sections of six-lane divided highways were collected. The available literature suggests that vehicle lateral distribution on a highway generally follows a normal distribution curves. Therefore the placement data was used to model mathematically by normal distribution. The K-S test was used to fit the goodness-of-fit of the distribution. K-S test of goodness-of-fit approved the fit of mixed normal distributions at all sections of six-lane roads. However, the mixed normal distribution or any other mathematical model failed to define the placement behavior on all sections of four-lane divided highway. There the study on untidy mixed traffic flow on four-lane divided highway with grouping of 5 min traffic volume of all sections with paved and unpaved separately was made and fuzzy approach is used to develop the models for Auto, Two-wheeler, Car and HV in MATLAB software. The degree of untidiness of these vehicles from model was compared with the degree of untidiness of 5 min traffic volume and the maximum error in difference of 5 was observed.