Non-motorized facilities capacity and level of service at intersections in a connected and autonomous vehicles environment

Date
2019
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University of Delaware
Abstract
The current trend that Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) will be a major focus of transportation and the automotive industry and be widely used in future traffic system analysis is inevitable. 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 thesis 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 of pedestrians and bicyclists on different types of intersections in urban areas. ☐ Five scenarios were created for simulation via VISSIM software that correspond to the different proportions of the CAVs and different signal systems in a typical traffic environment. Meanwhile, 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 last part of this thesis concentrates on developing a new model for evaluating pedestrians’ LOS in urban areas based on HCM suitable for CAVs environments. The most important goal and results of this study are, for engineers and/or policymakers, to have a tool to conduct a comparison of capacity and LOS regarding the impact of CAVs on pedestrians during the process of a transportation system transition to CAVs.
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