A Lane Selection Model for Urban Intersections

TRB 2008 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal. 2 In this paper, we present a lane choice model for urban arterial intersections. This replaces the rule-based heuristics to assign vehicles in their subsequent lanes used in state-of-the-art microscopic traffic simulators. The lane choice at intersections is modeled as a two step process: target lane choice and immediate lane selection based on the selected target lane. The target lane is the lane the driver perceives as the best to be in taking a wide range of factors and goals into account. These include path-plan considerations and lane-specific attributes and can vary with the planning capability and aggressiveness of the driver. However, maneuver to the target lane may not be possible immediately. The observed trajectories only consist of the immediate lane choices of the drivers. The choice of immediate lane is conditional on the target lane selection and affected by maneuverability considerations and aggressiveness of the driver. The parameters of the target lane and immediate lane choice models are jointly estimated with detailed vehicle trajectories. The heterogeneities of the driver population, both in terms of planning capability an