Date of Award

12-2018

Degree Name

Master of Science in Engineering

Department

Civil and Construction Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Jun-Seok Oh

Second Advisor

Dr. Valerian Kwigizile

Third Advisor

Dr. Osama Abudayyeh

Keywords

Safety, bicycle signal treatments, VISSIM, surrogate safety measures, bike boxes and protected intersections

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

With the dramatic increase of non-motorized transportation users, more people are concerned about the non-motorized traffic safety. Unfortunately, bicyclist and pedestrian are prone to more severe injuries when involved in a crash. For bicycle crashes, failing to yield/disregarding traffic control device, and lack of non-motorized facilities were identified to be the main causes of bicycle crashes in urban intersections. This research investigated the effectiveness of two bicycle crash countermeasures with bicycle signal treatments at urban signalized intersections. The two countermeasures are the bike boxes and the protected intersections. The bicycle signal treatments are the leading bicycle interval and the exclusive bicycle phase.

A before and after bicyclist survey was conducted to measure bicyclist perception of safety of the bike box. Additionally, these engineering countermeasures were evaluated from both traffic operation and traffic safety prospective in a virtual test environment built in VISSIM. Users delay were compared before and after implementing these countermeasures. While a surrogate safety measure “conflicts” was used to measure the safety impact of the treatments. By benefit-cost analysis, the threshold values of traffic and bike volumes that are needed to justify the studied treatments were found. This research also provided a general guideline that can be used by the decision makers to facilitate bicyclist left turn movement at urban signalized intersection.

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