Exploring environmentally sustainable traffic signal warrant for planning application

ABSTRACT

With the concerns over the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the surface transportation, the environmentally sustainable traffic signal warrant is essential to provide guidelines for making environmentally conscious decisions about control types at intersections. This research conducted a pilot study on developing CO₂ emissions-oriented traffic signal warrants. Intersection control types that were analyzed for this research include two-way stop, four-way stop, traffic signal, and roundabout. Two environmentally sustainable traffic signal warrants were proposed: Type I (without roundabout) and Type II (with roundabout). The proposed traffic signal warrants were compared with the existing mobility-oriented traffic signal warrant of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) in terms of CO₂ emissions and total delay. The measurements were collected and estimated using a microscopic traffic simulation tool, Verkehr In Stadten—SIMulationsmodell (VISSIM). The environmentally sustainable traffic signal warrants show that the annual CO₂ emissions of the ground transportations in the USA were reduced by 7.2% with Type I warrant and 13.9% with Type II warrant.

KEYWORDS:

• Emissions
• mobility
• MUTCD
• traffic signal warrant
• VISSIM microscopic traffic simulation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank a research group at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center including Taylor W. P. Lochrane, Dr. Joe Bared, Dr. Daniel J. Dailey, and Dr. Wei Zhang, and Dr. Nopadon Kronprasert at Virginia Tech for providing the simulation model of roundabout which was used to build a part of the simulation testbeds of this research.

Funding

This research project was in part supported by the Global Research Laboratory Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) & Future Planning (2013K1A1A2A02078326) as well as Mid-Atlantic Transportation Sustainability University Transportation Center.