Capacity model of on-rampmerging section of urban expressway

To establish the empirical capacity model of an on- ramp merging section, the Erlang distribution is first selected to define the time headway distribution, and then the gap acceptance theory is applied to develop the basic capacity model of the on-ramp merging section. Since not all the time headways on the shoulder lane can be made full use of by on- ramp vehicles, a modified capacity model is developed, which takes the usage probability of time headway into consideration. Then, a model of capacity discount coefficient ~： is developed. Finally, based on the modified capacity model and the model of capacity discount coefficient, an empirical merge capacity model which contains the shoulder lane volume, critical gap, and the distance from nose to merging point, is constructed. Results show that, compared with other models, the proposed model is more reasonable since it takes merging section geometry into consideration, and it is easy to apply. The merge capacity varies with the shoulder lane volume, the critical gap, the distance between the nose and the merging point, and the design velocity of the shoulder lane and ramp.