A Multilane Traffic Flow Model Accounting for Lane Width, Lane-Changing and the Number of Lanes

Multilane widely exists in the urban traffic system and its traffic flow is more complex than the single-lane traffic flow since it may be affected by each lane’s width, the number of lanes and lane-changing. In this paper, we first use empirical data to study the impacts of lane width and the number of lanes on multilane traffic flow, then propose a new multilane traffic flow model and finally use numerical tests to explore the influences of the variation of lane width, closing lane and changing the number of lanes on each lane’s traffic flow. The numerical results show that the new model can qualitatively reproduce the complex traffic phenomena resulted by the variation of lane width, closing lane and changing the number of lanes and that changing each lane’s width, closing lane and changing the number of lanes may reduce the reliability of the multilane traffic system. In addition, some numerical results are qualitatively consistent with the phenomena that are resulted by the heavy rain in Beijing on July 21, 2012, which shows that our model can perfectly reproduce some complex traffic phenomena in multilane system from the qualitative perspective. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014