Priority Pass: Fair and Efficient Signalized Intersection Control

Conference in Emerging Technologies in Transportation Systems (TRC-30), Heraklion, Greece, September 02-04, 2024

Road transportation systems are usually designed for optimizing transportation efficiency. A pure focus on efficiency overlooks, that passengers are not equal in their urgency delays cause them different harm. Vehicle prioritization is a promising countermeasure to this equity issue. Existing strategies for prioritization can be grouped into three categories dedicated lanes (e.g. public transport in Levinson et al. (2002)), legislative prioritization of blue light vehicles (e.g. ambulance in Nellore & Hancke (2016)), and economic instruments (e.g. high occupancy toll lanes in Dahlgren (2002)). There is no dedicated instrument that allows for prioritization at intersections in practice yet, even though intersections are a major source of delays in urban contexts. In this work, we analyze, to which extent it is possible to expedite a certain share of vehicles at intersections, without causing arbitrary delays for the other vehicles or affecting transportation efficiency de trop. We propose the Priority Pass, a needs-based signalized intersection management. Entitled vehicles shall be prioritized at intersections, resulting in shorter delays. The Priority Pass is an intelligent transportation system, that builds upon auction-controllers, and existing, urban, vehicle-identifying infrastructure (Iliopoulou et al., 2022). Experiments with varying number of prioritized vehicles, total traffic flows, and symmetry of demand, are conducted. The results demonstrate, that this concept generates significant benefits to the drivers, which do not come at the cost of transportation efficiency or arbitrary delays.