Planning Application for Mobility Assessment of Intersection Forms in Intersection Control Evaluation

Abstract

The use of alternative intersections and interchanges (AIIs) has proliferated significantly over the past two decades. Their introduction is motivated by the need to improve mobility and safety at conventional signalized and unsignalized intersections. This paper presents a mobility assessment component of the intersection control evaluation (ICE). The focus of this component was to develop a planning application and computational tools for the Stage II mobility analysis that can fill the current gap in coverage of the diverse (and expanding) suite of AIIs. The design of the tool prioritized the simultaneous analysis of multiple AIIs within the same platform using a common input dataset. This feature of the tool guarantees that alternative forms can be compared side-by-side under the same set of inputs and parameter assumptions using overall system delay as the key performance measure. In addition, the research developed a framework and movement definition scheme that enables the extension of the current platform to accommodate new and yet to be conceived innovative intersection forms. A comparison against two widely used commercial analytical platforms yielded virtually identical system delays and level of service ratings across 17 case studies covering eight different AII forms and under varying intersection congestion levels. The maximum system delay difference between the two methods was about 5 s, with an average absolute difference of less than 2.5 s. Future work will focus on expanding the tool to unsignalized versions of AIIs along with new and innovative forms that appear on the horizon.