An innovative design for left turn bicycles at continuous flow intersections

Abstract

To improve the practical capacity of the continuous flow intersections (CFI)
and eliminate the conflict between left-turn bicycles and through vehicles,
an optimization design method for left-turn bicycles was proposed.
The pre-stop line for through vehicles and the crossing passage for leftturn
bicycles were set at the pre-signal points of the CFI. The control of the
through vehicles at pre-signal was added in the proposed method. A linear
programming model was established to achieve the maximum vehicular
practical capacity. The optimization effectiveness and applicability for this
design were validated by a case study and sensitivity analyses. The results
show that the improvements in practical capacity obtained by the proposed
method increase with the increase of the left-turn bicycles volume
and through vehicle percentage, while decrease with longer cycle length.
As for bicycles, the proposed method can reduce the delay in the case of
high traffic demand.