The March meeting was held on March 28, 2012 at the Municipal Building. The guest speaker was Mr. Xin (Alyx) Yu – President, ITE Hawaii Student Chapter, UH-Manoa Doctoral Candidate, Traffic and Transportation Engineering.
A signalized intersection is a fundamental component of an urban transportation system and appropriate treatments for intersection related congestion and safety issues are increasingly growing in importance. The most direct and intuitive approach to alleviate the recurring congestion is to cope with the peak hour disparity between travel demand and supply at the bottleneck intersections by expanding intersection capacity. However, intersection treatments such as adding lanes, turning movement restrictions, and grade separation that were traditionally applied to improve intersection capacity may not realize the expected benefits of relieving congestion and reducing delay as the traffic conditions at the downstream intersections can be greatly deteriorated by increased upstream arrivals.
Mr. Xin Yu was selected to present his research paper entitled “Analysis of Downstream Queues on Upstream Capacity Expansion of Urban Signalized Intersections” at the upcoming 2012 ITE Western District Annual Meeting in Santa Barbara. Mr. Yu’s study was conducted to provide traffic engineers with a simple, practical, step-by-step analysis method to identify the occurrence and the type of queue spillback, to determine the effects of downstream queues on upstream capacity and to select the best capacity expansion treatment.