Effects of pavement surface deformations on lane-changing behaviours

Drivers often undertake tactical and safety-related lane-changing (LC) behaviours to minimise their driving effort and travel times under different and complex traffic circumstances. LC behaviour can be affected by various factors such as lane configurations, driver characteristics, pavement surface properties and so on. Pavement surface deformations represent one such factor that forces drivers to change lane. Road surface deformations generally makes driving more difficult and they cause an increase in vehicle operation and maintenance costs. Additionally, they cause many problems, such as traffic congestion and accidents. In this study, the aim is to investigate and explain the effects of pavement surface deformations and other parameters on the LC behaviour of drivers. This study constitutes descriptive research, which uses a logit regression model (LRM) to determine the LC behaviour of drivers. The data set was collected from two different cities (Izmir and Erzurum) and four different deformed road zones in Turkey. It was found that pavement surface deformations have a high impact on the LC behaviour of drivers, and passenger cars are the vehicle type that is most affected by surface deformations. Numerical tests showed that the proposed LRM performs reasonably well in terms of the statistical relationship between LC and effective parameters.