Exploring Traffic Congestion on Urban Expressways Considering Drivers’ Unreasonable Behavior at Merge/Diverge Sections in China

The mechanisms of traffic congestion generation are more than complicated, due to complex geometric road designs and complicated driving behavior at urban expressways in China. We employ a cell transmission model (CTM) to simulate the traffic flow spatiotemporal evolution process along the expressway, and reveal the characteristics of traffic congestion occurrence and propagation. Here, we apply the variable-length-cell CTM to adapt the complicated road geometry and configuration, and propose the merge section CTM considering drivers’ mandatory lane-changing and other unreasonable behavior at the on-ramp merge section, and propose the diverge section CTM considering queue length end extending the expressway mainline to generate a dynamic bottleneck at the diverge section. In the new improved CTM model, we introduce merge ratio and diverge ratio to describe the effect of driver behavior at the merge and diverge section. We conduct simulations on the real urban expressway in China, with results showing that the merge section and diverge section are the original location of expressway traffic congestion generation, and on/off-ramp traffic flow has a great effect on the expressway mainline operation. When on-ramp traffic volume increases by 40%, the merge section delay increases by 35%, and when off-ramp capacity increases by 100 veh/hr, the diverge section delay decreases about by 10%, which proves the strong interaction between expressway and adjacent road networks. Our results provide the underlying insights of traffic congestion mechanism in urban expressway in China, which can be used to better understand and manage this issue.