Lateral Displacement and Distance of Vehicles in Freeway Overtaking Scenario Based on Naturalistic Driving Data

The design of passenger-dedicated lane width is essential for freeway reconstruction and expansion projects. However, the technical standard of lane width established in China is based on trucks. This study aims to propose a passenger-dedicated lane width calculation method for freeways based on overtaking behavior. Computer vision technology was used to extract vehicle trajectories and dimensions from videos captured by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Statistical methods such as cumulative frequency statistics, typical percentile statistics and regression analysis were employed to elaborate on the lateral displacement and distance of vehicles during overtaking. The results show that vehicles’ lateral displacements are mainly related to behaviors such as lane changing, lateral distance maintenance and lane keeping. The body width sum of parallel vehicles has little effect on the geometric center distance but significantly reduces the wheel distance when increasing. The general value of the passenger-dedicated lane width on freeways is recommended to be 3.5 m, and the limit value is 3.25 m. Compared with existing lane width calculation methods, this study pays more attention to the relationship between vehicle width and lateral distance, which can better cope with the challenges caused by vehicle diversity in lane width design.