Pedestrian Safety at Intersections under Control of Permissive Left-Turn Signal

Abstract

This research investigated the impacts of pedestrians on the safety performance of intersections with permissive left-turn signal control by conducting three studies: traffic engineers' survey, field traffic-conflict study, and historical crash-data analysis. The results of this research demonstrated that pedestrian volume, opposing through-vehicle volume, left-turn-vehicle volume, and intersection width in the opposing direction were significant contributing factors to the safety of pedestrians under permissive left-turn signal control. The T-intersection was found to be more dangerous than the four-leg intersection was for operation of a permissive left-turn signal. Finally, this research suggested that conducting traffic-conflict studies could be an effective alternative for safety analysis because of the high correlation between the data on collected historical crashes and the observed traffic conflicts at the eight intersections studied.

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