Motorized Two Wheeler Lateral Clearance Behavior in Heterogeneous Traffic: A Sensor Based Approach

In India, traffic flow behavior is highly heterogeneous and does not follow any lane discipline which encourages vehicles to occupy any available lateral position along the road width. In absence of lane discipline, vehicles not only interact longitudinally but also laterally. While in most of the developing countries, passenger cars and Motorized Two Wheelers (MTW) are major constituents of total traffic composition, the traffic operational analysis are focused mostly only on passenger car. Whereas, two wheeler possess unique characteristics thus behaving differently from passenger car. Therefore, understanding the behavior of MTW is necessary to study its impact on traffic stream. This research work focused on studying lateral clearance maintaining behaviors of motorized two wheelers in aspect of heterogeneous traffic context. Ultrasonic and Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors were used in this research for collecting detailed and accurate microscopic traffic data. The results showed that the subject vehicle tends to maintain smaller lateral clearance when road occupancy is high. Another objective of this study was to investigate the factors affecting lateral clearance. Lateral clearance varied with subject vehicle speed, interacting vehicle type. Lateral clearance was observed to exhibit positive gradient with speed of the subject vehicles. Furthermore, the lateral clearance maintained by vehicle followed General Extreme value and Weibull distributions.