With the increased prevalence of roundabouts in the United States, there is a need to evaluate the performance of roundabouts relative to other intersection control strategies. Few studies have compared roundabouts with other intersection control strategies in a systematic fashion. Consequently, this Thesis compares four types of intersection control strategies considering a single lane approach with a 58 km/hr speed limit and equal demand on all approaches. The study demonstrates that vehicle delay is minimized with the use of a roundabout intersection control for all demand levels below 500 veh/hr/approach. Above this point if the left turn percentage exceeds 70% traffic signal control is more efficient. The roundabout alternative also produces the fewest vehicle stops for low demand levels, low left turn demand and high right turn demand, however a TWSC alternative produces the least number of vehicle stops when the through and total demand is high. This study illustrates that fuel consumption and carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions can be improved with roundabout control over other intersection control strategies. The research presented here demonstrates that for low traffic demand levels roundabouts should be part of design alternatives considered for isolated intersection control. / Master of Science
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/76831 |
| Date | 31 August 2011 |
| Creators | Jackson, Meredith A. |
| Contributors | Civil Engineering, Rakha, Hesham A., Katz, Bryan J., Ahn, Kyoungho |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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