Evaluation of Driving Behavior and Traffic Safety at a Shifting Movements Intersection

Abstract

Unconventional intersection designs have been proposed for their theoretical potential to enhance traffic safety and operation simultaneously as a result of reducing the number of conflict points and signal phases. However, this has only been achieved with a very limited range of intersection designs which have a very low number of conflict points and under certain traffic conditions. For example, restricted crossing U-turn (RCUT) intersection, which has the lowest number of conflict points among other proposed intersection designs, has operational advantages at extremely unbalanced traffic volumes. Shifting movements (SM) intersection design, which has the same number of conflict points as the RCUT intersection, has been proposed to replace the RCUT implementation at intersections with medium to high minor traffic volumes. It was proven that SM outperforms an RCUT intersection which has medium to high minor traffic volumes in average delay and throughputs. This study aimed to investigate the safety aspects of this intersection design by utilizing the driving simulator. The effectiveness of using infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communication for mitigating confusion at unconventional intersections was also investigated in the study. The results indicated that RCUT and SM intersections have similar safety performance and crossing them is completed with less risk than crossing the conventional intersection. However, there is a need to improve drivers’ knowledge about the SM intersection, especially with regard to the major left-turn movement. Most participants found that using I2V communication was helpful in understanding unconventional movement patterns.