Development of a Procedure for Prioritizing Intersection Improvement Projects Considering Safety and Operational Factors

To utilize the limited budget allocated for intersection improvements more effectively, transportation agencies need to develop an annual plan that can prioritize intersection improvement projects and select the projects that can maximize the budget utilization for implementing. The current method used in Florida is based solely on the ratio of improvement of safety performance to project costs. This article presents a new decision-making supporting procedure, namely, Multi-Layer Prioritization (MLP), to prioritize intersection improvement projects considering safety and operational factors rather than considering safety factor only. The new procedure combines the successive ranking methodology and the hierarchical clustering algorithm to prioritize projects in several layers with which various factors associate in terms of relative importance of the factors. The consideration of safety and operational factors in the new procedure can provide more effective prioritization results, whereas the successive structure of the new procedure offers flexibility to increase or change considering factors. Three factors-benefit-cost ratio for safety performance, reduction in average control delay, and existing control delay-are utilized in the proposed procedure. And a case study was also conducted to demonstrate the new procedure using intersection improvement projects collected in Florida