Enhanced Evaluation of Heavy Vehicle Lane Restriction Strategies in Microscopic Traffic Simulation

Abstract

Heavy vehicles can considerably affect traffic flow particularly during heavy-traffic conditions. Large numbers of heavy-vehicle lane-changing maneuvers can contribute to increase the number of traffic accidents and hence to reduce the freeway safety. The increase in the number of heavy vehicles on freeways has been the motivation to establish strategies to reduce the interaction between heavy vehicles and passenger cars. Previous studies have examined different lane-restriction strategies for heavy vehicles using microscopic traffic-simulation packages. Those packages mostly use a general lane-changing model to estimate the lane-changing behavior of heavy-vehicle and passenger-car drivers. ..