A road which narrows at a bottleneck from an ý-lane road to a one-lane road is studied with the aid of two independent stochastic processes. Special attention is given to headways. At the bottleneck an equilibrium headway can be viewed as the maximum of a shifted exponential random variable and a maximum headway. After the bottleneck the situation becomes far more complicated. However, at a sufficiently large distance from the bottleneck an equilibrium headway may be approximated by the maximum of a shifted exponential random variable and a minimum headway, with the parameters of the shifted exponential random variable depending on the desired speed of the car. The distance from the bottleneck only affects the location, not the scale. Results are checked by Monte Carlo experiments.
Abstract