Maneuvers analysis of shared taxi and their effects on flow characteristics

In Iran, shared taxis are playing significant role in public transport. Maneuver of shared taxi through lanes in order to pick-up and drop-off passengers and asking their destinations may lead to disorder in traffic flow. In order to investigate the effect of these maneuvers (or sudden lane changing) on traffic flow, it is essential to simulate these maneuvers on the existing roads in intelligent traffic simulator software. In this research Aimsun software was selected as a traffic modelling software. The selected path was simulated twice. First it has been simulated with all geometrical characteristics of path and all passing vehicles, without maneuvers of shared taxis. Travel time parameter of vehicles was selected to evaluate the validity of this simulation. After observing errors between simulation and real time measurement, maneuver of shared taxis around stop areas was added to the previous simulation. It was observed that simulating the maneuvers of shared taxi decreased the error significantly. By comparing these two travel time the considerable effect of these maneuvers was recognized around 16.95% on travel time of passing traffic flow in this path.