On a multi-lane roadway, systematic lane-changes can seriously disrupt traffic flow and cause capacity drops. In this paper, the author proposed tocapture such disruption effects by doubling the contribution to the totaldensity of a lane-changing vehicle, since it can affect vehicles on both its previous and target lanes. The author then present a model of lane-changing effect coefficient and a modified fundamental diagram in effective density. With 75 minutes of vehicle trajectories collected for a freeway section on interstate 80 by the NGSim project, the author carefully study the impacts of lane-changing traffic for different lane-changing thresholds,time intervals, cell sizes, and locations and calibrate the lane-changingeffect coefficients and corresponding fundamental diagrams. Depending on the choice of lane-changing thresholds, the capacity drops are found to bein the magnitude of around 10% or 20%, which are consistent in magnitudewith a theoretical prediction and those in the literature. In addition toits effectiveness, the new model is simple and can be easily incorporatedinto kinematic wave models for studying traffic dynamics in a lane-changing area.
Samenvatting