Disorder effects in cellular automata for two-lane traffic

For single-lane traffic models it is well known that particle disorder leads to platoon formation ar low densities. Here we discuss the effect of slow cars in two-lane systems. Surprisingly, even a small number of slow cars can initiate the formation of platoons at low densities. The robustness of this phenomenon is investigated for different variants of the lane-changing rules as well as for different variants on the single-lane dynamics. It is shown that anticipation of drivers reduces the influence of slow cars drastically. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.