Investigation of headway distribution of traffic dominated by motorcycles

Abstract

The use of lower class vehicles such as two or three wheelers have become the preferred urban transport in some developing countries. However, most of the traffic theories adopted are from developed countries where cars are prevalent. The headway probability distribution models can be used to describe vehicle-to-vehicle interactions. Most of these distributions are parametric and makes an underlining assumption about the data. A case study was conducted to investigate the performance of the different probability distributions that best describes the vehicle to vehicle interaction of motorcycle dominated road in Bida, Niger state Nigeria. The different parametric distributions and non-parametric distribution (Kernel) of the data were tested for the goodness-of-fit. The test results indicate that the kernel distribution fits best with improved P-values which in turn gives a better description for the headways than other distribution models considered. This study can serve as a foundation for developing generalized headway models in developing countries.