Author(s)

M. Lake, L. Ferreira & D. Stewart

Abstract

The use of heavy vehicles that are capable of carrying increased loads has continued to increase rapidly, Such vehicles, such as B-Doubles, Road-Trains and other large sized vehicles, are termed here as Multi-Combination Vehicles (MCV). Significant economic benefits result from the use of such innovative vehicles, which are able to carry up to twice the payload of standard semi-trailers, Those benefits, however, need to be traded-off against the potentially negative impacts on other road users, such as additional delays in urban areas. The research detailed here will deliver an increased understanding of some of those impacts by investigating models which can be used to estimate delays to other road users. Preliminary results from adding small numbers of MCV for a freeway section and an intersection demonstrated a significant adverse impact on the performance of the network. These results imply higher passenger car equivalent values than those commonly used for MCV. Further research is being conducted, including calibrating the input parameters and performing the same network simulations on other micro simulation packages to compare the results.

Keywords