Impact of Road Bends on Traffic Flow in a Single‐Lane Traffic System

Abstract

Taking the characteristics of road bends as a research object, this work proposes the cellular model (CA) with road bends based on the NaSch model, with which the traffic flow is examined under different conditions, such as bend radius, bend arc length, and road friction coefficiency. The simulation results show that, with the increase of the bend radius, the peak flow will be continuously increased, and the fundamental diagram will become more similar to that of the classic NaSch model; the smaller the bend radius is, the easier it is for the occurrence of blockage; for different bend lengths, all the corresponding traffic flows show that the phenomenon of go-and-stop and the bends exert slight inhibitory effect on traffic flow; under the same bend radius, the inhibition effect of the bends on the traffic flow will be weakened with the increase of the friction coefficiency.

Theory and Simulation for Traffic Characteristics on the Highway with a Slowdown Section

“…It is obvious that the simulation consequences are not affected by the exact position of the slowdown section in the whole road, since the periodic boundary condition is adopted [7]. Initially, all vehicles are distributed on the road with uniform headway, so the global density is ρ = NL car / L , N is the number of vehicles.…”

“…As for bottlenecks, the most important kinds of them are so-called flow-conserving and non-flow-conserving bottlenecks [2, 3]. When passing flow-conserving bottlenecks all vehicles pass from upstream road section to its immediate downstream road section; no vehicle leaves or enters, while non-flow-conserving bottlenecks contain sources and sinks constituted by on-ramps, off-ramps, tunnels, intersections, and so on [4–7]. …”