Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	628
Event Title:	New Technologies in Collecting and Archiving Nonmotorized Travel Data
Event Date:	Jan 24 2012 3:45PM- 5:30PM
Event Location:	Hilton, Georgetown West
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Preliminary Development of Methods to Automatically Gather Bicycle Counts and Pedestrian Delay at Signalized Intersections (12-2107)

The increase of bicycle and pedestrian traffic in many urban areas has led to growing interest in multimodal performance measures. Traditionally, counts of pedestrians and bicycles have only been collected for short durations at spot locations. The lack of reliable long-term data precludes systematic performance monitoring and analysis of trends. This paper summarizes preliminary efforts to develop a long-term monitoring and collection system that leverages existing infrastructure to monitor bicycle and pedestrian activity. Communication and logic protocols have been implemented to gather bicycle counts and pedestrian delay using existing hardware (loop detectors, signal controllers) and software at select intersections within the City of Portland, Oregon. Bicycle counts are being gathered using advance loops in bike lanes. Two novel methods for collecting pedestrian delay at signalized intersections are proposed in this paper. One method uses transit priority logging feature in the traffic controller software to track individual pedestrian phase actuations and corresponding delay. The other method uses internal logic commands to capture pedestrian delay estimates in relevant bins. Both methods provide delay and number of pedestrian actuations which can be used to characterize the pedestrian LOS at an intersection. The results from the study reveal that automation of data collection techniques for generating multimodal performance measures can assist in analyzing performance and long-term trends. The methods developed in this study can benefit other regions in understanding the effects of signal timing settings on multimodal performance.

Authors
     Kothuri, Sirisha Murthy, Portland State University
     Reynolds, Titus , City of Portland, Oregon
     Monsere, Christopher M., Portland State University
     Koonce, Peter J .V., City of Portland, Oregon