Gap-acceptance in road traffic

Abstract

We find the distribution of delay to minor road vehicles waiting to merge or cross a single stream of major road traffic. The decision to cross is taken on the basis of a gap-acceptance function. The model turns out to be a simple queueing problem in which a customer finding an empty queue has a different service time distribution from queueing customers. The key to this representation is given in Section 3. Some numerical results in Section 6 indicate that in most circumstances a simple model will give adequate results.