How vehicles change lanes after encountering crashes: empirical analysis and modeling

When a traffic crash occurs, following vehicles need to change lanes to bypass the obstruction. We define these maneuvers as post-crash lane changes (LCs). In such scenarios, vehicles in the target lane may refuse to yield even after the lane change has already begun, increasing the complexity and crash risk of post-crash LCs. However, the behavioral characteristics and motion patterns of post-crash LCs remain unknown. To address this gap, we construct a post-crash LC dataset by extracting vehicle trajectories from drone videos captured after crashes. Our empirical analysis reveals that, compared to mandatory LCs (MLCs) and discretionary LCs (DLCs), post-crash LCs exhibit longer durations, lower insertion speeds, and higher crash risks. Notably, 79.4% of post-crash LCs involve at least one instance of non-yielding behavior from the new follower, compared to 21.7% for DLCs and 28.6% for MLCs. Building on these findings, we develop a novel trajectory prediction framework for post-crash LCs. At its core is a graph-based attention module that explicitly models yielding behavior as an auxiliary interaction-aware task. This module is designed to guide both a conditional variational autoencoder and a Transformer-based decoder to predict the lane changer’s trajectory. By incorporating the interaction-aware module, our model outperforms existing baselines in trajectory prediction performance by more than 10% in both average displacement error and final displacement error across different prediction horizons. Moreover, our model provides more reliable crash risk analysis by reducing false crash rates and improving conflict prediction accuracy. Finally, we validate the model’s transferability using additional post-crash LC datasets collected from different sites.