Abstract:

Vehicles decelerate in advance when entering a residential area, forming traffic bottlenecks. Especially in evening peaks, vehicles returning to residential areas will significantly reduce road capacity. This paper introduces anticipation time to reflect the deceleration behavior of vehicles before entering the residential area based on the velocity-dependent randomization (VDR) model. Both the one-way, single-lane system and the two-way, two-lane system are studied in this paper. The simulation results show that there is a critical injection probability when the entry probability is large enough. When the injection probability is greater than the critical value, a traffic platform appears. The critical injection probability and its corresponding flux value decrease with increasing the entry probability. When the injection probability is less than the critical value, the flux in the two-way, two-lane system is greater than that in the one-way, single-lane system. There are three bottlenecks in the two-way, two-lane system: the entrance to the residential area and the upstream and downstream ends of the road. When the entrance to the residential area is not close to the ends of the road, the influence of the entrance location on road capacity is negligible.

Key words: cellular automata, velocity-dependent randomization (VDR) model, traffic bottleneck, road capacity