Modeling of traffic flow disturbances due to parking and unparking at the edge of the roadway

Abstract

To date, there is insufficient knowledge abouttheinfluence of parking maneuvers in public road space on road safety and traffic flow. Therefore, the aim of the investigations was to quantify potential hazards during parking and unparking, to describe the influence of parking maneuvers on traffic flow and to summarize the relevant results in a simulation model. Accident statistics were used to prove that parking maneuvers in connection with moving traffic play practically no role in the accident sequence. Conflict situations, derived from video recordings, also only occur in an infinitesimally small number (less than 1%) of parking and unparking maneuvers, whereby a particular danger to cyclists could not be proven. From a previous study on left-hand parking, the recommendation was adopted that parking on the left-hand edge of the carriageway should only be permitted, if at all, in streets with a permissible speed of 30 km/h. The results of this study are not necessarily the same as those of the previous study. Empirical studies on waiting times in moving traffic caused by parking maneuvers yielded negligible contributions in the order of less than one tenth of a second to a few tenths of a second per vehicle. Nevertheless, a freely available simulation program "EPAVA" was developed to determine the effects of varying boundary conditions, such as different traffic volumes or shares of left-hand parkers on parking space utilization or parking search traffic. The occurrence of accidents and conflicts was not simulated in the model for the reasons mentioned above.

This Abstract was translated from German with deepL and could be faulty.