How Students See a Signalized Intersection: Teaching and Learning the Methods of the Highway Capacity Manual

Two transportation engineering courses are described that show how the signalized intersection method of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) is taught for the first course in transportation engineering and for a later course, at the graduate level, in intersection operations. Both courses are grounded in seven principles that have persisted over the sixty years since the publication of the first HCM in 1950. These principles were identified from a review of the five editions of the HCM. Each course is tailored to the different experience levels of the students, leading to different representations or models of the signalized intersection that are appropriate for these two groups. New curriculum materials for the introductory course based on the HCM planning method were developed after a study of student learning in this course. Materials for the graduate course based on the HCM operational analysis method were developed over a period of more than twenty years of testing the appropriateness of models of signalized intersection operation of varying complexity appropriate for these more experienced students.