“To Lane or Not to Lane?”—Comparing On-Road Experiences in Developing and Developed Countries Using a New Simulator RoadBird

Even though the traffic systems in developed countries have been analyzed rigorously and operated efficiently, the same does not generally hold for developing countries due to inadequate planning, design, and operations of their transportation systems. Because of inherent differences between internal infrastructures, the strategies deployed in developed countries may not be amenable to developing ones. Besides, developing countries’ traffic systems are not well-studied in the literature to the best of our knowledge. For example, it is yet to explore how a developed country’s lane-based traffic flow would perform in the context of a developing country, which generally experiences non-lane-based traffic. As such, by using our newly developed traffic simulator ‘RoadBird,’ we investigate outcomes of both lane-based and non-lane-based traffic from the contexts of both developing and developed countries. To do so, we run simulations over real road topologies (extracted from the GIS maps of major cities such as Dhaka, Miami, and Riyadh), considering different scenarios such as lane-based or non-lane-based flows, homogeneous or heterogeneous traffic, with or without pedestrians, etc. We also incorporate various car-following and lane-changing models to mimic traffic behaviors and investigate their performances. While the lane changing dilemma remains an open research question, our experimental evidence indicates: 1) lane-based approaches will not necessarily perform better in the case of currently-adopted non-lane-based scenarios, and 2) non-lane-based strategies may benefit system performance in lane-based scenarios while having heavy mixed traffic. Nonetheless, we reveal several new insights for on-road experiences both in developing and developed countries.