Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A one-lane road briefly expands to two lanes at a stoplight before merging back into one.Some drivers always choose the right lane, while others pick the shorter lane, favoring the right in a tie.In our previous paper, we represented arrival sequences as binary strings that created lattice paths, and analyzed how many vehicles end up in the left lane, drawing heavily on connections to ballot paths.Presently, we consider limited lane capacities: when the right lane fills, a gap can form in the left lane.We calculate the expected size of this gap based on the proportion of each driver type, including new bijections.
Authors: Erik Insko, Katie Johnson, Shaun Sullivan
Institutions: Central College, Florida Gulf Coast University
Language: English
Subfield: Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7125475643