Speed and Headway Behaviour of Motorcycles on an Exclusive Motorcycle Lane

Abstract

The motorised two-wheeler population in India is increasing rapidly. Currently, cars constitute over 13% of the vehicle population in India, while two-wheelers constitute more than 70%. Although more convenient and affordable than cars, the two-wheelers pose a serious traffic problem. India records the maximum number of deaths from two-wheeler accidents in the world. One solution to minimising such problems is segregation of these two-wheelers from the rest of the traffic. The objective of this study is to investigate speed and headway behaviour of motorised two-wheelers on Indian urban roads and how the behaviour is changed if these two-wheelers are separated from the main traffic stream. For this, video graphic data is collected on identified study corridor in Vadodara, Gujarat. Traffic data is collected without any changes in the prevailing road conditions, this scenario is referred to as Business-as-Usual (BAU). Thereafter, a 3.5 m wide lane is physically separated from the mainstream using barricades and this scenario is referred to as exclusive motorcycle (MC) lane. The speed and headway data is extracted from video graphic data for both scenarios. It was observed that the 85th percentile speed of two-wheelers is reduced from 51 to 36 km/h after segregation. The results indicate that there is a significant difference in the mean headway of two-wheelers before and after segregation. This study modelled the distribution of headways for both scenarios. The outcome of this study is useful in the capacity estimation of the exclusive motorcycle lane. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.