Evaluation of Overtaking Behavior on Two-Lane Rural Highway with Paved Shoulder
摘要
The codal mandate for upgrading unpaved shoulder to paved shoulder of two-lane Indian highways calls focused investigation of overtaking behavior in such facilities. The available works focused on studying overtaking behavior in two-lane highways having unpaved shoulder in homogenous traffic condition. This study focuses on analyzing overtaking behavior in two-lane Indian highways with paved shoulder configuration, catering mixed traffic. The overtaking time and distance are studied for Cars, two-wheelers (TW), light commercial vehicles (LCV), Bus and Heavy vehicles (HV), when these vehicles are overtaking the test vehicles-Car in two-lane highway with 1.50 m paved shoulder on either side of carriageway. Since speed difference between overtaking and overtaken vehicle affects overtaking time, the study also attempts to develop relationship between speed difference and overtaking time for each class of vehicle. It was observed from the study that the overtaking time and distance for Cars and TW is the least with small standard deviation. However, for Bus, LCV and HV, the overtaking time and distance and variation in these observations are large. Comparing the results with overtaking time in two-lane highways without paved shoulder in Indian condition, it was observed that the addition of paved shoulder significantly reduced overtaking time for Cars. However, the overtaking time for LCV or HV was not affected significantly. Overtaking time for two-wheelers is not available in standard literature and thus could not be compared.