Empirical Analysis of Heterogeneous Traffic Flow

Traffic flow in many developing countries is strongly mixed comprising vehicle types, such as motorcycles, cars, (mini) buses, and trucks; furthermore, traffic flow typically exhibits free inter-lane exchanges. This phenomenon causes a complex vehicle interaction, rendering most existing traffic flow modeling approaches insufficient and requiring a new approach. New approaches to the heterogeneous non-lane-based flow have been proposed but empirical verification has been lacking. To bridge this gap, this paper presents some preliminary analyses on a data set collected from a number of road sections in the city of Surabaya, Indonesia. Video data is used to capture aspects of vehicle interaction. Using the porous flow approach, we investigate aspects related to the pore size-density distributions and class-specific critical pore sizes.