A preliminary study on variability of desired speeds

For the purpose of simulating real-life traffic, the desired speed, as a common parameter of many microscopic traffic simulators, should be modeled reasonably. The traditional practice is that a driver's desired speed is drawn from a predefined distribution or a distribution estimated from the field data collected on the road and kept unchangeable in a long travel. In this paper, a computational model is proposed to describe the variations of desired speeds at high flow. To validate this model, a relevant simulation experiment based on the proposed model has been conducted, and then the simulation data were compared with the field data in terms of volume, mean speed and speed-volume relation. The results show that the simulation data present a relatively good fit to the field data.