Field Measurement of Approach Delay at Signalized Intersections Using Point Data

Delay is considered one of the most important measures of effectiveness used to design, optimize, and evaluate the operation of signalized intersections. Many methods have been proposed to measure delay; however, none of those found in the literature has been tested against delay derived from tracking vehicles to evaluate accuracy. A new point detection-based method to measure approach delay in the field is presented. In contrast to other methods, this method produces more detailed delay measurements because it measures the delay by turning movement and does so with simple point data. Data for this research were collected from video footage for signalized intersections, where vehicle tracking was used as the benchmark and the Highway Capacity Manual queue delay was collected for comparison purposes. Results of the comparison indicate that the proposed method accurately measures delay.