TITLE:
Pedestrian Facilities Capacity and Level of Service at Intersections in a Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Environment
AUTHORS:
Yifan Wang, Ardeshir Faghri, Dian Yuan, Michael L. Vaughan, Mingxin Li
KEYWORDS:
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, Pedestrians, VISSIM, Level of Service, SSAM
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Transportation Technologies,
Vol.9 No.4,
September
18,
2019
ABSTRACT: It is inevitable that Connected and
Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) will be a major focus of transportation and the
automotive industry with increased use in future traffic system analysis.
Numerous studies have focused on the evaluation and potential development of
CAVs technology; however, pedestrians and bicyclists, as two essential and
important modes of the road users have seen little to no coverage. In response
to the need for analyzing the impact of CAVs on non-motorized transportation,
this paper develops a new model for the evaluation of the Level of Service
(LOS) for pedestrians in a CAVs environment based on the Highway Capacity
Manual (HCM). The HCM provides a methodology to assess the level of service for
pedestrians and bicyclists on various types of intersections in urban areas.
Five scenarios were created for simulation via VISSIM (a software) that
corresponds to the different proportions of the CAVs and different signal
systems in a typical traffic environment. Alternatively, the Surrogate Safety
Assessment Model (SSAM) was selected for analyzing the safety performance of
the five scenarios. Through computing and analyzing the results of simulation
and SSAM, the latter portion of this paper focuses on the development of a new
model for
evaluating pedestrian LOS in urban areas which are based upon HCM standards
which are suitable for CAVs environments. The results of this study are
intended to inform the future efforts of engineers and/or policymakers and to
provide them with a tool to conduct a comparison of capacity and LOS related to
the impact of CAVs on pedestrians during the process of a transportation system
transition to CAVs.