Vehicular traffic modeling with greedy lane-changing and inordinate waiting.

Abstract Lane changing and vehicular slowdowns are known to impact traffic flow. Using a modified Nagel–Schreckenberg cellular automata model for two vehicle types: blocking (e.g. cars) and non-blocking (e.g. motorcycles), we determined the thresholds at which the interplay of lane changing, random and non-random slowdowns strongly impact vehicle speeds. Lane changing improves speed with diminishing returns as vehicles opt to change lanes. At the same time, lane changing is detrimental to the overall speed when lane straddling occurs. Increasing random slowdowns beyond a critical value (in the case of motorcycles, slowdown values of p slow ≈ [ 0. 2 , 0. 3 , 0. 4 ] for densities ρ = [ 0. 20 , 0. 15 , 0. 10 ] respectively) can force crossover from free flowing traffic into a state where interactions between vehicles reduce the average speed. Highlights • A modified NaSch traffic model is proposed with the addition of lane changing. • The fraction of vehicles that change lanes move faster than those that do not. • Increasing the fraction of lane changers has diminishing returns in the speed difference of vehicles. • Phase transitions due to the value of slowdown probability are coupled with density. • Slowdown transition is different from the density phase transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]