Development and Evaluation of Non-Traditional Pedestrian Timing Treatments for Coordinated Signalized Intersections

Abstract

Pedestrian signal timings are one of the major issues to be addressed when developing signal timing plans. So far, two different treatments of pedestrian timings for coordinated systems exist. The first treatment accommodates pedestrian timing within the cycle. Therefore, it requires longer cycle lengths that usually increase the total delay on the network. In contrast, the second treatment uses shorter cycle lengths sufficient to serve vehicular demand only. The problem with the latter is that the concurrent phase is usually not long enough to serve pedestrians. Thus, with every pedestrian call, a follow-up transition process occurs, affecting cycle lengths and coordination quality. This study develops two novel pedestrian timing treatments to overcome the problems of the traditional ones. Novel pedestrian treatments utilize a cycle length optimized to cover necessary times for vehicular phases, although pedestrian timings may require longer time intervals. However, when pedestrian calls occur, their minimum safety timings are accommodated within such a shorter cycle, and thus the transition process is not required. Our study evaluates the proposed and traditional pedestrian timing treatments using a corridor of five signalized intersections in West Valley City, Utah. Various experiments were conducted in a microsimulation environment VISSIM and collected results were statistically compared. Results show the promising property of the proposed treatments, as they outperformed the traditional pedestrian timing treatments. Therefore, further investigation of these pedestrian timing treatments is warranted. Future research should investigate possibilities of implementing similar treatments to fully actuated control systems on various networks and traffic conditions.