Abstract: Traffic simulation heavily relies on lane model. This paper presents a novel method to model lanes based on the road axis under the Frenet frame. The road axis is generated from the geographic information system data after curve approximation, discretization, and compression. This lane model couples mileage information with three-dimensional geometric information, so it offers an easy and fast position transformation from mileage to the Cartesian coordinate. It also keeps strictly consistent for mileage among neighboring lanes so that it facilitates lane-change processing. Compared with existing methods that depict lanes as simple polylines or curves, the proposed lane model is more functional and more efficient, especially for complex traffic simulation with a large number of lane-changes. Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.