Modified Motor Vehicles Travel Speed Models on the Basis of Curb Parking Setting under Mixed Traffic Flow

• Main Authors: Zhenyu Mei, Jun Chen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2012-01-01
• Series: Mathematical Problems in Engineering
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/351901

The ongoing controversy about in what condition should we set the curb parking has few definitive answers because comprehensive research in this area has been lacking. Our goal is to present a set of heuristic urban street speed functions under mixed traffic flow by taking into account impacts of curb parking. Two impacts have been defined to classify and quantify the phenomena of motor vehicles' speed dynamics in terms of curb parking. The first impact is called Space impact, which is caused by the curb parking types. The other one is the Time impact, which results from the driver maneuvering in or out of parking space. In this paper, based on the empirical data collected from six typical urban streets in Nanjing, China, two models have been proposed to describe these phenomena for one-way traffic and two-way traffic, respectively. An intensive experiment has been conducted in order to calibrate and validate these proposed models, by taking into account the complexity of the model parameters. We also provide guidelines in terms of how to cluster and calculate those models' parameters. Results from these models demonstrated promising performance of modeling motor vehicles' speed for mixed traffic flow under the influence of curb parking.