Journal of Korean Society of Transportation ISSN:1229-1366(Print) 2234-4217(Online) 대한교통학회지

Interest in freeway truck traffic has increased largely due to greater safety concerns regarding truck-related crashes. The negative interactions between slow-moving trucks and other vehicles are a primary cause of hazardous conditions, which lead to crashes with larger speed variations. To improve operational efficiency and safety, providing a climbing lane that separates slow-moving trucks from higher performance vehicles is frequently considered when upgrading geometrics. This study developed an operations strategy for freeway climbing lanes based on traffic conditions in real time. To consider traffic safety when designing a dynamic strategy to determine whether a climbing lane is closed or open, various factors, including the level of service (LOS) and the percentage of trucks, are investigated through microscopic simulations. A microscopic traffic simulator, VISSIM, was used to simulate freeway traffic streams and collect vehicle-maneuvering data. Additionally, an external application program interface, VISSIM’s COM-interface, was used to implement the proposed climbing lane operations strategies. Surrogate safety measures (SSM), including the frequency of rear-end conflicts and , were used to quantitatively evaluate the traffic safety using an analysis of individual vehicle trajectories obtained from VISSIM simulations with various operations scenarios. It is expected that the proposed algorithm can be the backbone for operating the climbing lane in real time for safer traffic management.