A Method for Determining the Number of Traffic Conflict Points Between Vehicles at Major–Minor Highway Intersections

Abstract

Background: Traffic conflict points are the areas formed by conflict movements in the traffic flow. The numbers and distributions of different types of traffic conflict points are often used to evaluate access management designs and the safety performance of intersections. Customarily, determining the number of different types of traffic conflict points is based on the manual drawing method, which is troublesome and makes using computerized procedures for calculation of the number of traffic conflict points difficult.

Objective: The present work aims to quickly compute the number of traffic conflict points between vehicles at major–minor highway intersections.

Methods: The concept of “virtual lanes” is defined, and the virtual lane conversion method is proposed. Based on actual and virtual lanes, vehicular movements, and traffic control modes, a generalized method to determine the number of traffic conflict points between vehicles at major–minor highway intersections is developed.

Results: A procedure for determining the number of conflict points is presented. A similar HCM LOS-style form and computer software were designed to help calculate the number of conflict points.

Conclusions: Applications show that the method can efficiently and accurately determine the number of traffic conflict points between vehicles at major–minor highway intersections.

Keywords:

• traffic conflict points
• virtual lanes
• conflict movements
• highway intersections

Acknowledgment

The authors are grateful for support from the Humanities and Social Science Fund Project under the Chinese Ministry of Education (Grant No. 12YJCZH162) and from the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (Grant No. ZR2012EEM005).