4-9: Supply Management of Auto Traffic to Address Starvation of Green in Multimodal Environments

Traffic congestion is challenging to resolve at closely spaced oversaturated intersections. This condition leads to underutilization of green time at upstream intersections due to queue spill back from downstream traffic signals (green starvation). Such conditions cause significant delays and queue backups. In addition, conflicting modes of travel, like pedestrians or rail, may exist at a site and limit available strategies to manage the green time effectively. This project will explore strategies to increase the utilization of green time that account for conflicting modes of travel. This project will use a preliminary field deployment, hardware-in-the-loop simulation analysis, and a revised field deployment to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies in reducing green starvation. In addition, the research team will use the site’s historically high traffic month of August to collect field data on the performance of the project’s revised strategy. The goal is to identify strategies that are effective at reducing the number of phase failures caused by blocked street segments downstream despite limitations set by pedestrian timings or rail preemptions.