Improving Traffic Flow Characteristics by Suppressing Shared Taxis Maneuvers

Abstract

The sudden maneuver of shared taxi through lanes in order to pick-up and drop-off passengers and asking their destinations -due to lack of designated stop locations- may lead to disorder in traffic flow. The main hypothesis in this research was that shared taxis sudden maneuvers and lane changings have negative effects on traffic flow characteristics and subsequently, suppressing these maneuvers will improve traffic flow characteristics. For this purpose, a study was done on a path in the city of Isfahan in Iran. First the investigated path simulated without shared taxi sudden maneuvers and then the outputs of this simulation were compared to the real measurement data. By this comparison, some differences were observed. The shared taxis maneuvers were added to simulation to see if the observed difference can be lowered. By comparing the outputs of these two simulations to the real situation parameters, the considerable negative effect of this maneuvers was recognized. After observing of the mentioned maneuvers negative effect, an innovative solution – allocating a line to shared taxis and High Occupancy Vehicles - was added to suppress shared taxi maneuvers in order to improve traffic flow characteristics. By applying this scenario on current situation delay of traffic flow and delay of shared taxis decreased from 458.48 sec. to 383.01 sec. and from 506 sec. to 450 sec. respectively. Besides, traffic flow and the number of shared taxis increased from 11986 to 12980 and 663 to 718 vehicle per hour respectively.