Analysis of risk levels for traffic on a multi-lane highway

TL;DR

This paper analyzes risk levels on multi-lane highways using crash metrics, focusing on how vehicle interactions and lane changes influence safety, with data from the A3 German highway.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of how lane-changing behaviors impact traffic risk levels using Time-To-Collision metrics on real highway data.

Findings

Lane-changing significantly affects potential conflict levels.

Time-To-Collision is an effective risk metric for highway safety.

Interactions among vehicles are key to understanding traffic risk.

Abstract

We present an analysis of risk levels on multi-lane roads. The aim is to use the crash metrics to understand which direction of the flow mainly influences the safety in traffic flow. In fact, on multi-lane highways interactions among vehicles occur also with lane changing and we show that they strongly affect the level of potential conflicts. In particular, in this study we consider the Time-To-Collision as risk metric and we use the experimental data collected on the A3 German highway.