Application of Empirical & Simulated Vehicle Trajectories in Risk Assessment at Signalized Intersection

Abstract

Increasing road traffic accidents and fatalities, road traffic safety has become a major health concern all over the world. Over the years several studies have been carried out to enhance the road traffic safety aspects. However, majority of the studies are focused lane disciplined homogeneous studies. The lack of studies concerning safety in heterogenous traffic environment with weak lane-based movements motivated this study. Safety assessment is usually done using the crash data (reactive approach) or using TCT employing surrogate measures (pro-active approach). In this study, vehicle trajectories at signalized intersection with weak lane disciplined mixed traffic conditions have been extracted and used to estimate various SSMs for safety assessment. The extracted empirical traffic data is further used to develop a microsimulation model for acquiring vehicular trajectories in various traffic scenarios. The data generated from simulation is then analyzed for rear-end conflict and crash risk probabilities. Based on results probable measure to mitigate rear-end conflicts at signalized intersection with weak lane disciplined mixed traffic are studied. Also Based on the results from variation in number of conflicts, SSM of DRAC is observed to be suitable for weak lane disciplined mixed traffic conditions.