Research in Layout of Pavement Markings in Freeway Merging Area

Currently, Chinese standards on pavement markings are unable to avoid the situation that the ramp vehicles in low speed merge to mainline prematurely without enough acceleration. The large speed difference could cause serious traffic accidents. When compared the Chinese standards with MUTCD in American, Chinese standards lack the provision of solid white line installed from the theoretical gore and extended downstream in freeway merging area as to prohibit the early merging maneuver. Therefore, this paper analyzed the characteristics of traffic stream in merging area and principle of designing acceleration lane length in China, proposed an algorithm for designing length of the solid white line with gap acceptance theory, and a demonstrating example was given.