Forced Merging in Traffic

A vehicle waiting at an intersection with a major road makes a merging maneuver into the mainstream traffic, thus possibly requiring oncoming traffic to slow down. This paper examines the resulting disturbance that this forced entry may create in the main stream, assumed to be a renewal process. After showing that the disturbance propagation is formally equivalent to the busy period of a related queuing model, explicit results on the length of disturbance period and the number of vehicles affected are obtained for the case of Poisson traffic. It is shown that there is some minimal main-stream headway which should be forced in order to maximize the rate at which entries can be made from the secondary road. Finally, two measures of accident potential for the merging maneuver are discussed.