Assessment Lane Changing Behavior in Local Rural Roads

Abstract

The lane changing model is one of the most important cornerstone models to build a traffic microscopic simulation model. To build such lane changing model, there is a need to investigate the drivers' characteristics from field data. Accordingly, this study has mainly focused on lane changing behavior of Iraqi drivers. A huge amount of data has been collected from different sites in Iraq using specific type of cameras; these five sites (roads) are: Baghdad-Hilla, Baghdad-Mahmudiyah, Baghdad-Kut, Baghdad-Diyala and Najaf-Karbala roads. In addition, gun-speed has been also used to collect data of desired speeds. Different data have also been collected such as flow, headway, and speeds. The results show that as the flow increases, the frequency of lane changing also increases up to specific range of flow then as flow increases the frequency of lane changing decreases. In addition, this study indicates higher number of lane changing over all observed sites comparing with other countries. Finally, this study also indicates that the violated number of lane change varies with different levels of flow.Space with a font size 6 9 of the leading, as well as traffic density and time headway [21]. Some examples of three lanes and two lanes to the process of changing lanes are described below:A-Three lanes: From Site No.1 and Site No.2, data were collected for different hours of the day, analyzed by a time interval of 5min [18] and a distance (D v ) of 250m (This distance to calculate the number of times during which change the lane), Figure 9 shows the relationship between FLC and the total traffic flow. For three lanes, the peak-hour of traffic flow is 4272veh/hr from Site No.2 as indicated in Figure 10. According to Figure 9, it was found that as flow increases the FLC increases, too, up to 3000veh/hr, then approximately as flow increases the FLC decrease which corresponds to the relations between flow and FLC. However, the FLC (about 1700LC/hr/km) is higher than other countries (see Figure 3) which is about 1100LC/hr/km. This is due to absence pavement marking and violated LC.