A Modified Post Encroachment Time Model of Urban Road Merging Area Based on Lane-Change Characteristics

As an effective method, Traffic Conflict Technology (TCT) is widely applied to estimate the safety level of some risky areas, especially for the merging areas in the urban roads. Most of researchers prefer to just exploit the promising safety assessment models using realistic traffic data to predict the numbers of conflicts. There are a few types of research focusing on how to predict traffic conflict assessment indexes precisely in merging areas. Despite some related studies have realized this critical dilemma, significant lane-change characteristics are usually ignored and it is worthwhile devoting much effort to this. Hence, a modified Post Encroachment Time (PET) model is proposed in this study, to figure out lane-change characteristics as well as accurately forecast traffic safety of the merging area. Unlike other conventional methods, such as Time to Collision (TTC) or PET models, the proposed model not only fully takes the lane-change characteristics of merging vehicles into consideration, but also it explores the safety requirements in the process of lane changing in details. Moreover, the calculation formula of the modified PET model is gradually deduced by the trajectory of merging behavior and velocity formula. Besides, for the sake of pursuing a high validity, this paper exceptionally adopts two crucial compositions of PET, and eventually gives a unified calculation formula. In order to determine an appropriate threshold, traffic conflict data collected from Guangyuan Road in Guangzhou are analyzed. The results clearly prove that PET <; 0.7 means a serious conflict, 0.7≤ PET <; 1.31 means a general conflict, 1.31≤ PET <; 2.25 means a slight conflict, and PET ≥2.25 means a potential conflict. Finally, 50 groups of PET data and a comparative experiment are collected to demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the modified PET model.