Quantifying the impacts of right-turn-on-red, exclusive turn lanes and pedestrian movements on the efficiency of urban transportation networks

Abstract

Previous studies demonstrated that restricting left turning movements can enhance transportation network efficiency. However, this strategy can lead to significant increases in the volume of right-turn movements. While these right-turn movements do not conflict with opposing through traffic, they still must interact with pedestrians in adjacent crosswalks. Further, their movement is influenced by the presence of right-turn-on-red, which is commonly applied at signalized intersections to improve intersection capacity, and the presence of exclusive right-turn lanes. This paper examines the influence of these three factors (pedestrian activity, right-turn-on-red, and exclusive right-turn lanes) on vehicular operational performance at a network-wide level. Simple grid network structures are considered due to their generalizability and the performance of three network types are tested: two-way streets that accommodate left turns, two-way streets that prohibit left turns, and one-way streets. The results reveal that when there are no pedestrians, right-turn-on-red can improve the operational performance regardless of the existence of exclusive lanes, especially for the networks restricting left-turn movements, and the presence of exclusive turn lanes increases the benefits obtained by allowing right-turn-on-red. The results also suggest that allowing right-turn-on-red is more important than providing exclusive lanes when the traffic load is light; however, under heavier traffic, exclusive turn lanes become more important. The presence of pedestrians reduces overall network performance and the benefits provided by right-turn-on-red for most scenarios, as expected. This decrease in performance is larger for networks made up of two-way streets compared to those made up of one-way streets. Exclusive lanes are also found to be critical for two-way streets with left turns protected to maintain network efficiency. Overall, prohibiting left turns on two-way streets still provides the largest operational performance of all networks with these features considered.