Simulation of pedestrian at intersections and investigation of its effect onto the capacity of intersection: A case study of Corlu district

The intersections and pedestrian crosswalks, which are civil engineering structures with their plans and design, has a great importance on the environment and economy and they must be designed accordance to the traffic conditions. For this purpose; the micro traffic simulation programs have gained importance in the recent years and have commonly been used by the traffic engineers in order to examine the effects of pedestrian and vehicle traffic effects individually and between each other. Nowadays, there are many types of micro traffic simulation programs developed by the experts and each of them has its own approach with their own parameters. The aim of this study is to perform an interactive modeling of pedestrian and vehicle traffics. For this purpose, an experimental study was performed for a four leg signalized intersection to model pedestrian and vehicle traffics. In this study, Vissim micro traffic simulation program was used to evaluate the effects of the pedestrian crosswalks location on the intersection performance. By changing the distance of the pedestrian crosswalks to the signalized intersection, optimized signal times had been determined, and the effect of distance on the performance of the intersection was handled numerically. In addition, the Armada intersection, located in a region adjacent to the shopping centers and mass housing areas in the Çorlu District of Tekirdağ Province, has been selected for the real simulation application. The effects of changing the pedestrian crossing positions to the intersection were examined by using Vissim software, according to the vehicle and pedestrian counts performed at this intersection. Keywords: Traffic simulation, pedestrian simulation, pedestrian crosswalk, pedestrian-vehicle interaction, signalized intersection, intersection performance.