Using Traffic Signal Control to Limit Speeding Opportunities on Bidirectional Urban Arterials

Although controlling speed on urban arterials is important for safety, conventional traffic calming techniques cannot usually be applied on arterials, and many jurisdictions prohibit automated speed enforcement. Moreover, unlike unidirectional arterials, bidirectional arterials with short intersection spacing are not amenable to green waves that can remove the incentive to speed. This research explores the ways that traffic signal coordination creates – or limits – speeding opportunities on bidirectional arterials. Two measures of speeding opportunity are proposed: number of unconstrained vehicles, meaning vehicles arriving at a stopline on green and with no vehicle less than 5 s ahead of them, and number of speeders in a traffic microsimulation in which 20% of the vehicles have been assigned a desired speed in the “speeding” range. Theoretical analysis, confirmed by two case studies, show how speeding opportunities are related to degree of saturation, cycle length, specified progression speed (as in inpu...