Members of the Texas Senate Transportation Committee concentrated their attention Mar. 8 on the problem of right-angle crashes at signalized intersections, and heard TTI testimony on options available to address the issue.
Ginger Goodin, Director of TTI’s Transportation Policy Research Center, reviewed a number of countermeasures and their potential crash reduction effectiveness, which include:
- Speed cameras: 31 percent.
- Warning flashers: 25 percent.
- Removal of an unwarranted signal: 24 percent.
- Increasing red clearance time: 20 percent.
- Installing side indicator lights for enforcement officers: 10 percent.
- Signs and pavement marking enhancements: 6 to 12 percent.
- Increasing yellow interval and adding all-red interval: 4 percent.
Increased officer enforcement and public awareness campaigns can also help to reduce right-angle crashes, but there is little data available regarding the effectiveness of these methods.
The testimony was prepared with the support of Robert Wunderlich, Lingtao Wu, and Myunghoon Ko of TTI’s Center for Transportation Safety.