Safety Performance Evaluation of Flashing Yellow Arrow: Time-of-Day Versus 24-Hour Operation

Abstract

The flashing yellow arrow (FYA), as the permissive left-turn indication, has been widely implemented to mitigate driving confusion caused by the permissive steady green indication. The selection of an appropriate FYA operation type, however, remains an open-ended question as few studies have evaluated the safety effectiveness of FYA under different operation types, that is, 24-hour, time-of-day (TOD), and switching from 24-hour to TOD. Moreover, since FYA has been typically used at intersections with a single left-turn lane, its safety effectiveness at intersections with dual left-turn lanes has not been well investigated. To bridge these gaps, this paper focuses on evaluating the safety effectiveness of FYA at intersections with varying numbers of left-turn lanes under different operation types and examining whether the FYA operation type switch affects safety performance. Empirical Bayes before/after studies are conducted for 24-hour, TOD, and switching from 24-hour to TOD FYA operation types using multivariate adaptive regression splines models in comparison with traditional negative binomial models. Safety performance functions are developed for different combinations of crash types and a different number of left-turn lanes. Results show that for intersections with either a single left-turn lane or dual left-turn lanes, 24-hour and TOD FYA operation types reduce crashes by 8.76% to 50%. However, intersections with dual left-turn lanes experience a 31.2% increase in total crashes when switching from 24-hour to TOD FYA operation type, while intersections with a single left-turn lane see a 60% decrease in rear-end crashes.