How Gaps are Created during Anticipation of Lane Changes

The pre-insertion process called anticipation is an essential component of a lane-changing manoeuvre. There is little empirical research regarding the impact of anticipation. Thus, this paper aims to explore the behaviour of the new follower (NF) in the target lane when it encounters anticipation by using new trajectory datasets. The changing magnitude of the reaction pattern is proposed to identify the NF’s behaviour. We find that the anticipation significantly affects the NF’s movement in terms of gap creation and speed reduction. Then, we conduct a detailed analysis of critical variables to reveal their relationship with the NF’s behaviour. Following this, we develop binary logistic models to predict the NF’s behaviour, resulting in a good performance. It also suggests that the NF’s behaviour is highly related to the anticipation-related variables. The transferability test results show that this model can be directly used in different locations and times with satisfactory accuracy.