Kinematic models of uniform deceleration, which are usually adopted for designing deceleration lanes, do not correspond with experimental observations carried out by various researchers. In excessively long deceleration lanes, many vehicles initially do not decelerate and, in some cases, a vehicle overtakes the vehicle that preceded it on the main road. In the construction to improve a section of a freeway near the city of Valencia, a weaving lane was changed to an exit lane. This allowed an analysis of the design and operation of a deceleration lane based on its length. Up to now, all research was carried out through field study of the phenomenon in various deceleration lanes, with different road and traffic characteristics according to their locations. In this research, for the first time experiments were carried out in the same scenario. Different configurations for the diverging lane were established, varying their length with road marking tapes. In each configuration of the deceleration lane video recordings with four cameras were taken for tracking the vehicle evolution on leaving the main road. Later, the videos were digitized and specific software was developed to convert the information from 2D to 3D. The successive positions of the vehicles on the roadway associated to times, give the trajectories, speeds, decelerations and accelerations. Then, the exit phenomenon was analyzed as a function of the lane length: exit trajectory types; speeds; decelerations and their localization. A detailed study of the potentially dangerous maneuvers was also carried out.
Abstract