Reducing Red Light Running (RLR) with Adaptive Signal Control: A Case Study

Traffic accidents are a leading cause of premature death for citizens, with millions of injuries and fatalities occurring annually. Due to the fact that a large proportion of accidents are caused by red light running, reduction of the frequency of red light running (RLR) has been extensively researched in recent years. However, most of the previous studies have focused on reducing RLR frequency through driver education or warning sign design, with little attention paid to the relationship between RLR behavior and traffic signal control. Considering RLR is significantly affected by the number of vehicles arriving during yellow, it is possible to identify RLR behaviors in advance by analyzing data on yellow-arriving vehicles. Meanwhile, based on the strong correlation between yellow arriving and RLR frequency, it is possible to reduce RLR by traffic signal control. In this paper, we propose a quantitative model of correlation between RLR frequency and yellow light arrival based on high-resolution traffic and signal event data from Twin Cities, Minnesota. On this basis, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) is implemented to find trade-offs between minimizing the RLR frequency and the traffic delay. A case study of a 6-intersection arterial road reveals that in unsaturation, saturation, and supersaturation flow, our approach can converge to a Pareto optimal front in 30–50 iterations, which shows that is possible to simultaneously reduce RLR frequency and enhance traffic efficiency safety, which is conducive to ensuring the life safety of traffic participants.