Simulated surrogate measures to assess the effectiveness of countermeasures at signalized intersections

Abstract

The traditional method for assessing safety conditions at signalized intersections depends on historical crash data. Difficulty and long waits for data collection as well as lack of reliability, represent some limitations. As a result of safety evaluation using traditional methods, countermeasures may be proposed to improve the degree of safety. This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of countermeasures at signalized intersections using micro-simulation model (VISSM10) software and the Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM) to deal with traffic conflicts as surrogate measures rather than crash data. The study relied on VISSIM10 to create a trajectory file as input of SSAM to conduct a traffic safety assessment using traffic conflict indicators of time to collision (TTC). Four four-legged signalized intersections in the city of Diwaniya are chosen to assess safety and then propose appropriate countermeasures. Different countermeasures are tested through simulation to estimate their effectiveness using two measures: the increase in time to collision and the percentage reduction in traffic conflicts. The results showed that model calibration reduced the mean absolute error of prevention (MAPE) and improved the fit between both the actual conflicts and simulated conflicts. A validation simulation has been performed compared with the observed conflict. According to the linear regression the number that simulated conflicts which highly related to the number of actual conflicts. Additionally, R² can be described by the difference in simulated conflicts. Results go with effectiveness based on crash data and promising for unknown ones.