A study on traffic signal patterns and performance measures accounting for pedestrian and vehicle flows

Abstract

Traffic control systems are crucial for managing traffic flows. Their main function is to reduce interactions among users for safety reasons while minimizing travel times. Traffic signal control optimization is primarily concerned with determining the cycle length and the signal pattern. Researchers often concentrate on the cycle length, whose impact on travel times is directly measurable. However, the choice of 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 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.

Date	27 Mar 2023
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Fausto Errico (Supervisor) & Luc Pellecuer (Co-supervisor)