An intersection turning movement estimation procedure based on path flow estimator

Estimation of intersection turning movements is one of the key inputs required for a variety of transportation analysis, including intersection geometric design, signal timing design, traffic impact assessment, and transportation planning. Conventional approaches that use manual techniques for estimation of turning movements are insensitive to congestion. The drawbacks of the manual techniques can be amended by integrating a network traffic model with a computation procedure capable of estimating turning movements from a set of link traffic counts and intersection turning movement counts. This study proposes using the path flow estimator, originally used to estimate path flows (hence origin–destination flows), to derive not only complete link flows, but also turning movements for the whole road network given some counts at selected roads and intersections. Two case studies using actual traffic counts are used to demonstrate the proposed intersection turning movement estimation procedure. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.