Evaluation of a New Intersection Design, “Shifting Movements”

Several unconventional designs have been suggested to enhance traffic operation and safety at intersections. However, the operational benefits of implementing some of them are achieved only under certain traffic conditions. For instance, the operational performance of the restricted crossing U-turn (RCUT) intersection design manifests only under highly unbalanced traffic conditions. The RCUT intersection outperforms conventional intersections that are subjected to high major traffic and light minor traffic volumes, while its operational performance fades at intersections with moderate to heavy minor road traffic. In this technical paper, a new innovative four-leg intersection design has been proposed to replace the RCUT intersection under moderate and heavy minor road traffic volumes. The new intersection design which has been named the “Shifting Movements” (SM) intersection has a low number of conflict-points compared with conventional intersections, but similar to the RCUT intersection. Therefore, similar safety benefits are expected to be achieved by the implementation of the SM intersection. Operational evaluations and comparisons between conventional, RCUT, and SM intersections have been conducted in the microscopic simulation environment. Different traffic volume levels and left-turn proportions have been assumed to represent the peak hour with moderate to high left-turn traffic. The results indicate that the SM intersection design significantly outperforms conventional and RCUT intersections that are subjected to high traffic volumes in average control delay and throughput.