Sensitivity Analysis of Traffic Characteristics vs Changing Traffic Volume for Traffic Light and Intelligent Traffic Light (Case Study: Mahan Street of Karaj City)

Reducing delay time is one of the essential problems in mega-cities. Transportation engineers and urban planners recommend various approaches decreased delay time such as utilizing intelligent traffic light and so on. In this paper, we investigate the effect of traffic volume changing on traffic characteristics on two consecutive intersections in two scenarios (with the usual traffic light and the intelligent traffic light) and for this purpose data of Mahan Street of Karaj city is utilized and this street is simulated in AIMSUN. Results indicate that the intelligent traffic light can reduce delay time (24.5%), travel time (16%) and stop time (28.9%) also it can increase harmonic speed (22.6%). Traffic characteristics changing of the intelligent traffic light is formed of two lines with different slope however, traffic characteristics changing of the traffic light is formed one line. Therefore, the intelligent traffic light is extremely sensitive to design volume rather than the usual traffic light.