Multi-Stage Pedestrian Crossings and Two-Stage Bicycle Turns: Delay Estimation and Signal Timing Techniques for Limiting Pedestrian and Bicycle Delay

Abstract

Signalized intersections sometimes involve multistage pedestrian crossings, in which pedestrians cross to one or more islands and then wait there for a signal to continue. When signals are timed without attention to pedestrian progression, pedestrian delay at multistage crossings can be very long. This paper addresses two issues. First, pedestrian delay at multistage crossings is rarely evaluated because there are no tools in the industry for that purpose except microsimulation. We present a numerical method for determining crossing delay with any number of stages and with the possibility of multiple WALK intervals per cycle. The same method can be applied to single stage crossings, to diagonal two-stage crossings where pedestrians may have path choice, and bicycle two-stage turns. This method has been implemented in a freely available online tool. Second, we describe several signal timing techniques for improving pedestrian and bicyclist progression, and thus reducing their delay, through multistage crossings. They include reservice for selected crossing phases, left turn overlaps, having pedestrian phases overlap each other, and bidirectional bicycle crossings which create path options for two-stage turns. Examples show the potential for large reductions in pedestrian delay, often with little or no increase in vehicular delay. In one example, the addition of a short pedestrian overlap phase reduced average pedestrian delay at a 3-stage crossing by 82 s while average vehicular delay increased by only 0.5 s.