Free-flow regime and overhead cost of vehicle size in traffic flow

Abstract

Heterogeneous traffic systems involve different sizes of vehicles, with different capacities in carrying passengers. The sizes of vehicles have associated overheads costs in terms of affecting traffic flow, associated with the benefits of carrying more passengers. This work investigates the effect of vehicle length on the vehicular and passenger throughput of a road model. Simulations show the free-flowing regime of traffic increasing with vehicle length. The overhead of increasing vehicle size is most significant in this region. In the congested regime, longer vehicles can easily overcome this overhead by increasing the number of passengers.