Drivers’ Lane Utilization for United Kingdom Motorways

Abstract

Lane utilization represents how the rate of traffic flow is distributed among the available number of lanes in a given section. This utilization or split is affected by several factors, including traffic flow rates and the presence and amount of heavy-goods vehicles (HGVs) within the traffic. It is important to study lane utilization because it is one of the input parameters for any traffic microsimulation models, which are increasingly being used to assess and suggest solutions for traffic problems. This paper uses two sources of data to model lane utilization—motorway incident detection and automatic signaling (MIDAS) data and individual-vehicles raw data. The latter source of data is specifically used to model how HGVs are distributed between motorway lanes as flow increases because MIDAS data do not specify the proportions of HGVs by lanes. Because the data used to develop the models in this paper are based on a relatively large set of data (compared with those represented by older models), one could argue that these models are more representative of current lane utilization on United Kingdom motorways. The development of lane-utilization models for HGV traffic will help in providing more realistic predictions of traffic behavior when represented by microsimulation models and in assessing such commercial vehicles using the lanes when it comes to pavement design.