Comparative Univariate and Regression Survival Analysis of Lane-Changing Duration Characteristic for Heavy Vehicles and Passenger Cars

In contrast to passenger cars, the lane-changing (LC) behavior of heavy vehicles has a more profound impact on traffic flow. This paper investigates LC duration characteristics for heavy vehicles and passenger cars through comparative univariate and regression survival analysis. LC events are extracted from the HighD dataset. Five commonly-used univariate survival models are introduced to explore the overall survival function of LC duration between passenger cars and heavy vehicles. Three accelerate failure time models are employed to investigate the difference of the influencing factors of LC duration. Our results demonstrate that a significant difference exists in LC characteristic between these two types of vehicles. The survival curve of heavy vehicles is always above that of passenger cars, and these two curves show a trend of moving away from each other and then gradually approaching. The median survival time (MST) of heavy vehicles is 0.57 s higher than passenger cars. Heavy vehicles would maintain a longer time-headway and distance-headway with preceding vehicle when changing lane, and their LC durations are less susceptible to such interactions with the preceding vehicle and more susceptible to their own speed. Finally, the main findings, modeling implications, practical applications, and future work have been discussed. We hope this paper could contribute to our further understanding of LC behaviors of heavy vehicles and passenger cars.

Automated summary

In contrast to passenger cars, the lane-changing behavior of heavy vehicles has a significant difference in terms of duration, with heavy vehicles having longer duration and being less influenced by interactions with preceding vehicles but more influenced by their own speed.