A comprehensive Approach toward Organization of Disordered Congested Urban Intersections (Case Study: Tohid Intersection, Tehran)

Combined with high travel times and environmental consequences, daily increase of metropolitan population as well as traffic congestion at urban intersections has turned into a major urban management problem. High traffic flow at main intersections in urban networks would lead to serious traffic delays. Accordingly, organizing the mainintersections of the network is most important in urban traffic studies where the geometry of each intersection, the control conditions, and the traffic volume along the intersection arms are considered the most significant factors. However, adopting a decentralized approach (i.e., studying each intersection as an isolated case) would generally lead to unfavorable results which cannot outcome a positive effect on the functionality of the network as a whole. In this paper, a new comprehensive approach is proposed for organizing disordered congested urban intersection by extending the vision from a single intersection to the whole local traffic network. The proposed method was subsequently applied to a main intersection in Tehran metropolitan and the obtained results are compared with those obtained from the conventional local approach. The results showed that the proposed approach would improve not only the traffic performance at the studied intersection, but also traffic flow throughout the network.