Now a days, modeling traffic characteristics are very important in evaluating traffic facilitates such normal section, weaving and merging sections. Lane changing and lane utilization are important traffic characteristics that are widely studied. Therefore this study is focused on both of these. The lane changing behavior affects the capacity and safety of roads. The distribution of vehicles among lanes of roadway is important in terms of different aspects such as safety, traffic management and even the structural design of roads. Field data have been collected from different rural roads. Two types of roads were studied; two-lane section and three-lane section. The results of analysis for collected data indicate that the driver behaviour is different in terms of lane utilization in Iraq from other countries and the same behaviour was found for lane changes also. Compared to other countries, Iraq has the lowest lane utilization and highest frequency of lane changes. These data are urgently needed nowadays for calibrating and validating the sophisticated programs such as simulated microscopic programs. These data are so important to mimic the reality for driver behaviors in rural roadways.
The lane changing model is one of the most important cornerstone models to build a traffic microscopic simulation model. To build such lane changing model, there is a need to investigate the drivers' characteristics from field data. Accordingly, this study has mainly focused on lane changing behavior of Iraqi drivers. A huge amount of data has been collected from different sites in Iraq using specific type of cameras; these five sites (roads) are: Baghdad-Hilla, Baghdad-Mahmudiyah, Baghdad-Kut, Baghdad-Diyala and Najaf-Karbala roads. In addition, gun-speed has been also used to collect data of desired speeds. Different data have also been collected such as flow, headway, and speeds. The results show that as the flow increases, the frequency of lane changing also increases up to specific range of flow then as flow increases the frequency of lane changing decreases. In addition, this study indicates higher number of lane changing over all observed sites comparing with other countries. Finally, this study also indicates that the violated number of lane change varies with different levels of flow.Space with a font size 6 9 of the leading, as well as traffic density and time headway [21]. Some examples of three lanes and two lanes to the process of changing lanes are described below:A-Three lanes: From Site No.1 and Site No.2, data were collected for different hours of the day, analyzed by a time interval of 5min [18] and a distance (D v ) of 250m (This distance to calculate the number of times during which change the lane), Figure 9 shows the relationship between FLC and the total traffic flow. For three lanes, the peak-hour of traffic flow is 4272veh/hr from Site No.2 as indicated in Figure 10. According to Figure 9, it was found that as flow increases the FLC increases, too, up to 3000veh/hr, then approximately as flow increases the FLC decrease which corresponds to the relations between flow and FLC. However, the FLC (about 1700LC/hr/km) is higher than other countries (see Figure 3) which is about 1100LC/hr/km. This is due to absence pavement marking and violated LC.
This study has mainly focused on studying the characteristics of selected rural roads in Iraq using the developed simulation model and S-Paramics in order to enrich the area of developing such traffic simulation model calibrated with field data. Thus, several sites, such as Baghdad-Hilla, Baghdad-Mahmudiyah, Baghdad-Kut, Baghdad-Diyala and Najaf-Kerbala, have been investigated such as two and three-lane sections. This paper has three objectives; first, to investigate driver behavior mostly according to collected data of lane changing, lane utilization, flow and time headway. The second objective is to develop simulation model starting from car-flowing and ending with the process of calibrating it graphically and statistically with field data. The third objective is to calibrate the well-known S-Paramics model with field data and comparing it with the developed model. More than 80hrs have been collected using video cameras placed on footbridges as vantage points. The graphical and statistical analyses demonstrate more accurate for the developed model with field data than S-Paramics model. This model may be considered as the first step towards modeling driver behavior in Iraqi rural roads and enhance this model to represent different behaviors according to the collected data.
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