Investigating the Influence of Heavy Truck Movement on Car-Driving Behavior along a Two-Lane Highway

Slow-moving heavy trucks decrease road traffic efficiency and pose severe safety concerns, making them a high-risk factor for accidents on two-lane highways. In conjunction with traffic flow theory and bottleneck theory, this paper analyzes the mechanisms behind the formation of heavy truck-induced moving blockages and their resultant effects. The results indicate that moving blockages represent a new type of “mixed traffic” phenomenon within continuous traffic flow facilities, characterized by varying road geometry, performance disparities, and differing speeds among vehicles. The resulting losses of temporal and spatial resources due to moving blockages dynamically change over time and space. The impact of heavy truck-induced moving blockages on passenger cars can be summarized into six categories, i.e., single following, continuous following, single overtaking, concurrent overtaking, overtaking termination, and merging.