Vehicular traffic modeling with greedy lane-changing and inordinate waiting

Lane changing and vehicular slowdowns are known to impact traffic flow. Using a modified Nagel-Schreckenberg cellular automata model for two vehicle types: blocking (e.g. cars) and non-blocking (e.g. motorcycles), we determined the thresholds at which the interplay of lane changing, random and non-random slowdowns strongly impact vehicle speeds. Lane changing improves speed with diminishing returns as vehicles opt to change lanes. At the same time, lane changing is detrimental to the overall speed when lane straddling occurs. Increasing random slowdowns beyond a critical value (in the case of motorcycles, slowdown values of P-slow approximate to [0.2, 0.3, 0.4] for densities rho = [0.20, 0.15, 0.10] respectively) can force crossover from free flowing traffic into a state where interactions between vehicles reduce the average speed. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.