Passing Lanes: Safety and Performance

This report examines the impacts of passing lanes on safety, journey time and user experience and provides guidance to assist in the development of passing lane installation projects. The research found that passing lanes result in safety benefits, including perceived safety by motorists, safer operational conditions, and historical crash reductions. Passing lanes were also found to improve journey times through a small increase in travel speed and a significant reduction in percentage of time spent following a slower vehicle. This project included a literature review safety analysis, before-and-after analysis of crash records, speed and headway analysis, and overtaking behaviour analysis journey time analysis, including development of modelling guidance and numerical experiments on the impact of passing lanes on travel speed and per cent time spent following road user experience survey analysis, including an analysis of perceptions and valuation of level-of-service a review and re-calibration of the TRAffic on Rural Roads (TRARR) model.  The report is available online from Austroads at https://austroads.com.au/publications/traffic-management/ap-r596-19