Identifying factors affecting drivers’ selection of unconventional outside left‐turn lanes at signallised intersections

You are here: Homepage > Search

Identifying factors affecting drivers’ selection of unconventional outside left‐turn lanes at signallised intersections

Free access

Liu, Pan / Xu, Chengcheng / Wang, Wei / Wan, Jingjing

An unconventional outside left‐turn lane design has been increasingly used at signallised intersections in the urban areas in China. The unconventional outside left‐turn lane design allows an exclusive left‐turn lane to be located to the right of through lanes. The study presented in this paper evaluated the factors that affected drivers’ selection of left‐turn lanes at signallised intersections where both inside and outside left‐turn lanes were provided. A binary logit model was developed to quantitatively evaluate the impact of contributing factors on drivers’ selection of outside left‐turn lanes. It was found that the chance of a driver choosing the outside left‐turn lane would increase with an increase in the traffic volume on the major street and the queue length in the inside left‐turn lane; and would decrease with an increase in the distance between the upstream side street to the signallised intersection. In addition, drivers of heavy vehicles and those from the upstream right‐side side streets were more likely to select outside left‐turn lanes. Based on the data analysis results, a procedure was proposed to help transportation professionals determine if outside left‐turn lanes were needed given traffic conditions and geometric characteristics of a signallised intersection.