Quadrant Roadway Intersections: Tradeoffs between Control Delay Savings and Extra Travel Time

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Quadrant Roadway Intersections: Tradeoffs between Control Delay Savings and Extra Travel Time

Yang, Guangchuan / Cunningham, Christopher M. / Brown, Michael R.

A quadrant roadway intersection (QRI) reduces congestion relative to a four-phase intersection. (Note: this study relates to traffic systems where vehicles drive on the right-hand side of the road.) It does this by removing left-turn traffic from the main intersection, resulting in a two-phase signal. Nevertheless, there is a lack of clear understanding of the tradeoffs between savings in control delay versus extra travel time experienced by the rerouted movements. This research compared the operational performance of five QRI designs with the counterpart conventional intersection (CI) under various traffic demand scenarios via TransModeler microsimulation modeling. Three measures-of-effectiveness (MOEs) were employed: time-in-system (TIS), control delay, and intersection capacity utilization. Simulation results show that all QRI designs outperform CI design for all three MOEs under all demand scenarios. QRIs with direct left-turn design have a smaller average TIS than those with loop left-turn design, indicating that savings in control delays did not offset the extra travel times. Under a relatively low demand condition, a single QRI design can generally balance the tradeoffs between control delay and extra travel time. Under a high demand scenario, a dual or full QRI with direct left-turns is preferred, since it reroutes or partially reroutes left- and right-turn traffic to secondary intersections, thus the main intersection has a lower capacity utilization and can accommodate more through-traffic demands than CI, single QRI, and dual or full QRIs with loop left-turns.