An Application of Social Force Approach for Motorcycle Dynamics

There are many researches on the characteristics o f car traffic flow. However, we have little knowledge of mixed traffic flow which i s very common in developing countries. In the mixed traffic flow, the behavior of cars and bu ses can be considered as lane-based movements. But motorcycles have non-lane movements because they are observed to change their direction and speed very often. Therefore, th e paper aims to investigate the mechanisms of interaction between motorcycles to give a good m easure of the mixed traffic volume in congested situation. This study develops a new appr oach to describe dynamic movement of motorcycles based on social force approach for pede strians. Microscopic data for model validation was collected from video images taken in the road intersection of Hanoi, Vietnam. Parameters were estimated by using SPSS software with non-linear aggression method. The result shows that proposed approach can make reasonable estimate of the histogram choice for the speed and direction of motorcycle dynamic m ovement.