Capacity Analysis of Pedestrian Treatments at Large Arterial Intersections and Comparison with a Lane-Equivalent, Small Intersection Gridded Network

Abstract

Intersections of major six-lane arterial roadways and minor four-lane arterial roadways are becoming increasingly common across the United States, in part due to the proliferation of hierarchical street design. Such intersections typically have dedicated turn lanes, resulting in large expanses of pavement that make accommodating pedestrians a difficult proposition. Using microsimulation to create over 1,200 scenarios, this research presents the level of service impact of trying to accommodate pedestrian crossings for 117 combinations of vehicle volumes, with the results suggesting that accommodating even modest levels of pedestrian activity will drastically reduce vehicular capacity. The same procedure was repeated for typical mitigation strategies such as slip lanes/pork-chop islands and two-stage pedestrian crossings with minimal improvement. Intersection performance is then compared to a lane-equivalent gridded street network of smaller intersections with the results suggesting that a finer-grained street network is far superior both in terms of accommodating pedestrians as well as overall vehicular capacity.