Evaluation of Travel Lane Narrow Configurations and Inflow Restrictions on Congested Arterials

Travel-way reorganization has been recognized as a way of negotiating limited road space and ever-increasing traffic demand. This paper evaluates different travel lane inflow restrictions under two travel lane reallocation schemes: (i) standard travel lane width, and (ii) narrow travel lane width. A computation experiment was conducted on a traffic corridor in Xi’an that carries around 6000, 8000, and 10000 person-trips per hour during off-peak, adjacent-to-peak, and AM/PM peak periods. When the inflow restriction for private cars entering the bus-only lane varies from 0.1 to 0.8, lower total travel time of all travelers could be achieved. As the traffic demand further increases, significant influence of lane inflow restriction on total travel time would be found. However, those differences in total travel time among various restrictions could be further reduced after adopting a narrow travel-way design. Meanwhile, the efficiency of traffic systems could also be enhanced for all demand levels.