Systematic Data Driven Detection of Unintentional Changes in Traffic Light Plans
Abstract
Abstract—Traffic light plans determine the time allocated to each movement within an intersection. The plan has high influence on vehicle travel performance such as on the average delay time or the probability to stop in the intersection. Traffic engineers of a city control its traffic lights and can make changes in their plans to improve traffic performance. As it is not always easy to predict the impact of such changes, their potential impact can also be negative. We present an experimental study of real changes in traffic plans in 12 cities with a total of over 12000 intersections within a time period of over 40 days. We focus on changes of the cycle time of plans that highly impacted performance metrics such as delay. We compare the overall impact of such changes and dive into several of them through a careful analysis. To the best of our knowledge, our study is one of the largest in its scope among experimental studies of traffic conditions in recent years.
