Development of a New Methodology for Evaluating Arterial Weaving Sections Including All Traffic Movements

Abstract

Arterial weaving segments present unique operational challenges because of frequent lane changes between origin–destination (OD) pairs. Existing methodologies, such as those in the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM7) and NCHRP 15-66, are formulated exclusively for through movements and therefore cannot accurately predict running speeds for vehicles performing weaving or turning maneuvers, which may represent more than half of the total traffic in these facilities. This study develops and validates a new methodology that estimates running speeds by OD and by segment, explicitly capturing the effects of lane utilization, turbulence index, and weaving ratio. Using the NCHRP 15-66 dataset, which includes drone observations from fifteen field sites and more than 1,000 calibrated microsimulation runs, models were estimated using feasible generalized least squares and evaluated through 10-fold cross-validation. The analysis confirmed that vehicles associated with different ODs exhibit statistically distinct running speeds, reinforcing the need for OD-specific modeling. The proposed formulation achieved an average RMSE of 5.27 mph across all OD movements and produced 29.6% lower RMSE than NCHRP 15-66 for through movements under high-demand conditions (> 450 vehicles per hour per lane). These findings demonstrate that OD-specific and regime-based modeling provides a more accurate and transferable representation of arterial weaving operations than existing analytical approaches.