Performance Analysis of One-Level Signalized Urban Intersections with Exclusive Pedestrian Phases and Diagonal Crossings

The exclusive pedestrian (hereinafter P) phase with a diagonal crossing is routinely introduced to improve P safety at high-volume intersections. The article analyses and evaluates the feasibility of the exclusive P phase and diagonal crossing at single-level smaller intersections, identifying the advantages and disadvantages of the exclusive P phase and diagonal crossing from the point of view of time losses. In the experimental part, traffic flow modelling is carried out. The traffic flow simulations show that an exclusive P phase is most beneficial in terms of time losses at an intersection with 2+2 lane intersecting streets and ≥ 900 P/hour with ≥ 1600 vehicles/hour (hereinafter V). In addition, an exclusive P phase can be implemented at the small intersections analysed in this paper, where the volume of V is low or medium, regardless of the number of P at the intersection

Comparison of the performance of hybrid traffic signal patterns and conventional alternatives when accounting for both pedestrians and vehicles

Traffic control systems are crucial for managing traffic flows. Their main function is to reduce interactions among users for safety reasons, while minimizing the travel times. Researchers often concentrate on the cycle length, whose impact on travel times is directly measurable. However, the choice of the signal pattern may also have a great potential to reduce travel times and unsafe situations. This potential is yet to be thoroughly investigated. In this work, we are interested in comparing different signal patterns in terms of the number of potential conflicts and delay time for both drivers and pedestrians. To this end, we first select three commonly adopted signal patterns, namely the Exclusive Pedestrian Phase (EPP), the Leading Through Interval (LTI) and the Two-Way Crossing (TWC). We then generalize existing methods for measuring user delay and safety for these three signal patterns. Moreover, we investigate a hypothetical hybrid pattern obtained by dynamically adapting the signal pattern to real-time data. The proposed methodology is applied to a case study considering an isolated intersection in Montreal, Canada. We perform computational experiments geared towards determining the best pattern according to ad hoc performance indicators and user flows. Results show that the EPP and LTI patterns generally perform better than TWC. EPP generally outperforms LTI when measuring the number of potential conflicts, while LTI outperforms EPP when considering delay times. Furthermore, the hypothetical hybrid pattern shows a positive but overall limited impact regarding both delay times and number of potential conflicts