Thoughts

From DixonWiki

What is the best way to teach students with Lab 5?

The Lab 5 objective is to teach them how to design signal timing for more congested situations. It is not to teach them how to manually take measurements or follow vehicles. This is only necessary if it will adequately meet a learning objective. In the case of this lab, our overall objective is to learn how the intersection operates as a system, within the more congested context. The specific objectives are to teach the following:

• Identify sufficient and deficient permitted left turn operations.
• How to add a protected left turn phase.
• Identify sufficient and deficient operations due to the additional phase.
• Respond to rectify the resulting deficient operations. In this case, these are unnecessary left-turn protection and inadequate max green time.

For example, to make our point regarding the permitted left turn problem, the student would only need to identify two or three vehicles that did not make it through the first green that they saw. Ideally, the students would have time to gather delay information. However, I think that it would be best to already have the delay information in a tabular form and they will observe artifacts of this delay level, which may be two or three vehicles having a longer delay or experiencing cycle failure. These observations could then be compared to the simulation of the improved conditions.