Abstract:

To quantify the impacts of high occupancy vehicles （HOV） entering the exclusive bus lane on road traffic efficiency， the car following and lane changing characteristics of bus， HOV and non-HOV were analyzed when setting the bus-HOV lane. Using the theory of cellular automata （CA）， and combining the control rules of the bus-HOV lane， the lane occupied by a vehicle and the type of a vehicle regarded as constraints were introduced into the asymmetric lane changing rules， and then a multi-lane CA model was established for the car following and lane changing of multi-type vehicles considering the bus-HOV lane. MATLAB software was used to accomplish numerical simulation to analyze the specific effects of the proportion of HOV， bus departure frequency and bus stop spacing on the traffic flow parameters and their relationships. The results show that： when the proportion of HOV is less than 0.5 on a three-lane road segment， setting the bus-HOV lane can not only improve road traffic efficiency but also ensure the speed of bus operation under the condition of high initial space occupancy； when the proportion of HOV exceeds 0.5， it is difficult to improve road traffic efficiency by restricting non-HOV from entering the bus-HOV lane； when the initial space occupancy is greater than 0.2， the higher the bus departure frequency is， the greater the decline of traffic volume of the bus-HOV lane is； when there are 5 bus routes to dispatch a bus every 3 minutes， compared with the low initial space occupancy， the traffic volume of the bus-HOV lane under the condition of the high initial space occupancy reduces by about 30%； the bus stop spacing more significantly affects the traffic efficiency of the bus-HOV lane， the longer the bus stop spacing is， the higher the frequency of HOV lane changing is， the more the increase of the congestion segments on the bus-HOV lane and the adjacent normal lane is， thus the traffic efficiency of the whole road is influenced.