Abstract

Intersections in highway and street networks are of importance to the traffic engineer who is responsible for design and operation of these facilities. They are generally a major bottleneck for smooth flow of traffic and major traffic delays as well as accidents take place on these locations. Thus there is a great need to properly study and subsequently design intersections on the road networks.

Unsignalized intersections are the most common type of intersections that we encounter on the Indian road network. Yet, they are least understood and the techniques to analyze their performance are not well developed. Unsignalized intersections in Indian road network are difficult to study as they are difficult to model. The complexity to model them arise due to the highly heterogeneous mix of vehicle types, undisciplined driver behaviour as well as the difficult problems of gap-acceptance and queuing which characterize any unsignalized intersection.

The main objective of this study is to develop a model of unsignalized intersections in the Indian road networks. An attempt is therefore made to develop a computer simulation based queuing model of such intersections. The model can handle various movements and vehicle types and can provide ad output, the delays to each vehicle, queue lengths at every instant of time as well as a variety of other performance measures such as average delay, average queue length, etc.