Reversal of travel time between “zipper” and “non-zipper” merging in traffic flow

Heavy traffic congestion occurs daily at an intersection of highway traffic. For releasing this congestion, the effect of ldquozipperrdquo merging of vehicles is discussed in this paper. This is the merging of vehicles on two lanes alternatively, and is achieved only by the local communication of vehicles between two lanes before merging. This ldquozipperrdquo merging is compared with the ldquonon-zipperrdquo merging, which is the merging without interactions of vehicles before merging, in terms of travel time. This investigation is performed by using numerical simulations with a new multiple-lane cellular automaton model which has slow-to-start effect. Numerical results show that the reversal of travel time between ldquozipperrdquo, and ldquonon-zipperrdquo merging is observed as the change of slow-to-start effect.