Protected and unprotected bike lanes in mixed traffic

Abstract

We simulated mixed car-bike road systems with dedicated bike lanes using the Nagel-Schreckenberg (NS) Model with lane-changing rules. We introduced a greediness probability p_δ representing the non-compliance of cars to the exclusivity of bike lanes. When bike lanes were unprotected, i.e. when cars used the bike lanes, cars impeded the movement of bikes and other cars to the extent that the scheme only worked out for the edge case of cars being the only road users. We also found how introducing bikes improved traffic flow: 1) mixed systems had higher throughput than homogeneous systems, and 2) at low densities ρ < 0.2, all-bike systems had higher throughput than all-car systems.