Print Email Facebook Twitter Capacity drop: A comparison between stop-and-go wave and standing queue at lane-drop bottleneck Title Capacity drop: A comparison between stop-and-go wave and standing queue at lane-drop bottleneck Author Yuan, K. Knoop, V.L. Leclercq, L. Hoogendoorn, S.P. Faculty Civil Engineering and Geosciences Department Transport and Planning Date 2014-12-31 Abstract In freeways, the maximum traffic flow through a bottleneck is usually higher than the outflow of congestion there. This phenomenon is called the capacity drop. In literature, there are considerable debates about the mechanism causing this phenomenon. This paper studies the mechanism by analyzing real life data of two different days. The traffic states downstream of a lane drop are analyzed. It is observed that the outflow of a stop-and-go wave on the three-lane section is lower than that of a standing queue upstream the lane-drop bottleneck. A more detailed analysis shows the phenomenon on lane level. Finally, two days’ data shows a common feature on flow distribution over lanes. This finding shows that even in congestion states, the flow in shoulder lane (slow lane) can be lower than that in other lanes in the three-lane section due to lower density. Moreover, it is found that close to the bottleneck, a larger part of the flow is in the median lane. After several hundred meters the lane flow distribution normalizes to equilibrium, indicating much lane changing out of the median lane directly downstream of the lane-drop bottleneck. At four-lane section upstream the bottleneck, a large number of lane changes occur there. The understanding of the mechanism behind the capacity drop, as well as the sizes of the capacity drop might lead to measures to reduce delay. Moreover, the flow distribution can contribute to lane changing models closely resembling reality. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:36d999bf-c863-4260-8976-c4f7d65175b0 Publisher TRB Source Symposium Celebrating 50 years of Traffic Flow Theory 2014 FTF Summer Meeting, Portland (USA), 11-13 August, 2014 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2014 The Authors Files PDF 308938.pdf 1.07 MB PDF 308942.pdf 13.77 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:36d999bf-c863-4260-8976-c4f7d65175b0/datastream/OBJ1/view