Lane Choice Behavior

The main objective of the study is to study the lane usage characteristics on Majura gate-Udhana darwaja road stretch,Surat which is a urban multi-lane road .Lane use distributions represent the proportion of an individual lane’s traffic out of the total traffic at a given multilane roadway. The distribution of total volume on lanes is an important feature of the traffic flow analysis on multilane roads. Usually, models describe traffic flow in one dimension i.e. along the road axis (longitudinal direction) even though traffic flow across the roadway width is generally not uniformly distributed. The trucks and slow-moving vehicles generally use the leftmost (shoulder-side) lane. Furthermore, the distribution of vehicles on lanes, especially that of heavy vehicles, is important for pavement maintenance management schemes, since pavement deterioration is not uniform on all lanes, but depends on the number of vehicles using each particular lane. 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, speed etc. The importance of studying lane utilization comes from the fact that it is one of the important parameters for refining the performance of micro-simulation traffic models. The researchers in developed countries used regression models to represent the effect of parameters such as traffic volume, traffic composition, average speeds of different vehicle types and stream speed, etc on lane utilization behavior. The present study is focused on study of lane utilization using multivariate analysis using lane utilization as a dependent variable and parameters like classified traffic volume, average speed of each category of vehicle, traffic composition and stream speed as independent variables.