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Development of Pedestrian Safety Based Warrants for Permissive
Left-Turn Control
Principal Investigator: Dr.
Yi Qi
Sponsoring Agency: Southwest
Region University Transportation Center, SWUTC
Period: September
1, 2008 ~ August 31, 2009
Research Abstract:
The exiting guidelines on left-turn operations mainly focus
on the traffic conditions at the intersections and do not
give particular considerations on the pedestrian safety
problems. For example, at the intersections with permissive
only or protected/permissive left-turn (PPLT) control,
pedestrians will move at the permissive phase with the
parallel through vehicular movement and the left-turn
vehicles have to yield to both opposing vehicles and
pedestrians at crosswalk. Under such complicate driving
conditions, collision risks rise if left-turn vehicles make
misjudgments and fail to yield to the pedestrians.The
existing warrants for PPLT control are developed mainly
based on the left-turn and the opposing through traffic
volumes, while the pedestrian volumes and other pedestrian
safety related factors, such as the design features of the
crossroads, the sun light directions 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 permissive
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.
Research Information
For further information about the research, please contact Dr. YI Qi
by telephone at (713) 313-6809 or by e-mail at
qiy@tsu.edu.
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