Quantitative Comparison between Leading Green and Conventional Setting of Pedestrian Crossing Signal Control at Intersections

The key to ensure the orderly operation of urban traffic is to realize the precise and reasonable signal control of cross-street pedestrians. In this paper, the effects of leading green and conventional setting signal control mode on pedestrian crossing efficiency are analyzed using the time-space diagram, in view of the actual pedestrian crossing demand under different traffic organization modes at signalized intersections. According to the pedestrian's arrival and departure time at the crosswalk and central safety island, the delay models of pedestrian crossing under different traffic organization and signal control conditions are derived, and the capacity constraint relations of pedestrian twice-cross safety island are developed. The results of example analysis demonstrates that the pedestrian delay models proposed in this paper can accurately calculate the pedestrian crossing delay corresponding to different traffic organization and signal control conditions. Compared with the conventional signal control mode, the average delay optimization effect of the leading green setting is more obvious for pedestrian once crossing, partial twice crossing, and complete twice crossing. Moreover, it is more advantageous to improve the service level of pedestrian's waiting area by adopting partial twice crossing traffic organization mode, under the condition of restricted capacity of twice-cross safety island, whereas it is relatively difficult to ensure the waiting comfort of central safety island by adopting complete twice crossing traffic organization mode.