Traffic Characteristics of Mixed Traffic Flow in Urban Arterials

Motorcycles are one of the main transportation modes in some Asian countries because of their advantages, such as better mobility and lower costs, compared with automobiles. Most of the current road designs, such as speed limits and lane markings, are based on automobile traffic and are not entirely suitable for motorcycles. Therefore, there is a need to investigate further the traffic characteristics of mixed traffic flows and vehicle interactions where the proportion of motorcycles is high. With a proposed novel data-collection approach using aerial videography, a detailed and accurate vehicle trajectory dataset for a traffic stream in an urban arterial system was collected. The mixed traffic characteristics such as lane choice, lateral position distribution, and spacing distributions at various levels of traffic density were investigated. These characteristics could be useful for the development of microscopic behavioral models and integration with traffic simulation models for the evaluation of a mixed traffic environment.