Development of Pedestrian Safety Based Warrants for Permissive Left-Turn Control

At the intersections with permissive only signal control, pedestrians will move at the permissive phase with the parallel through vehicular movement and left-turn vehicles, the left-turn vehicles have to yield to both opposing through vehicles and pedestrians at crosswalk. Under such complicated driving conditions, collision risks rise if left-turn drivers make misjudgments and fail to yield to pedestrians. The existing guidelines on left-turn operations mainly focus on the traffic conditions at the intersections and do not give particular considerations to pedestrian safety problems. They are mainly developed based on the left-turn and the opposing through traffic volumes, while the pedestrian volumes and other pedestrian safety related factors, such as design features of the crossroads, direction of sunlight, and the sight distance of the left-turn drivers have not been explicitly taken into account. Thus, the objective of this research is to develop pedestrian safety based warrants for protected left-turn control. In this research, the driving-simulation based experiments will be conducted for identifying and assessing the impacts of the factors that contribute to the crashes between left-turn vehicles and pedestrians during the permissive left-turn phase, and develop pedestrian safety based warrants.