Research on the Capacity and Detrimental Impacts of the Waiting Area for Straight and Right-Turn Vehicles

The vehicle-waiting area makes contribution to improve the spatial utilization in the intersection, decrease the queue length and improve the capacity of the approach. However, the vehicle-waiting area may cause some detrimental impacts, such as increasing stopping frequency and fuel consumption. In order to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the vehicle-waiting area, this study selects the waiting-area for through and right-turn vehicles (hereafter abbreviated as TR waiting-area) as the research target. This study analyzes vehicles’ behaviors in the TR waiting-area. Based on the analyses, this study proposes a model for calculating the capacity of the TR waiting-area. Then we validates this model with the data collected in the Jiangsu Road–Changning Road intersection, Shanghai. The data is also used to compare the capacity of the lane with and without TR waiting-area. This study analyzes the beneficial impacts and detrimental impacts from the emission of waste gas, average stop frequency and average delay.