Enhanced Evaluation of Heavy Vehicle Lane Restriction Strategies in Microscopic Traffic Simulation

Heavy vehicles can considerably affect traffic flow particularly during heavy-traffic conditions. Large numbers of heavy-vehicle lane-changing maneuvers can contribute to increase the number of traffic accidents and hence to reduce the freeway safety. The increase in the number of heavy vehicles on freeways has been the motivation to establish strategies to reduce the interaction between heavy vehicles and passenger cars. Previous studies have examined different lane-restriction strategies for heavy vehicles using microscopic traffic-simulation packages. Those packages mostly use a general lane-changing model to estimate the lane-changing behavior of heavy-vehicle and passenger-car drivers. The general lane-changing models ignore the fundamental differences in the lane-changing behavior of passenger cars and heavy vehicles. However, an exclusive lane-changing model for heavy vehicles can increase the accuracy of simulation models. The application of such a model can result in a more reliable evaluation of lane restriction strategies. In this paper, different lane restriction strategies are defined for heavy vehicles. For each strategy, the macroscopic and microscopic traffic measurements of two freeway sections in California are analyzed, using the VISSIM default lane-changing model and an exclusive heavy- vehicle lane-changing model. The results show that the VISSIM default model unrealistically overestimates the observed number of heavy-vehicle lane-changing maneuvers and potentially overestimates the number of traffic accidents. Using the exclusive lane-changing model for heavy vehicles enhances the accuracy of the VISSIM traffic simulation model in microscopically estimating the lane-changing maneuvers of heavy vehicles. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)TE.1943-5436.0000301. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.