Fine-grained Measurement of Vehicle Delay Fairness
Abstract
Optimizing signal timing in traffic lights helps to improve traffic flow and reduce emissions through reducing delays. At intersections, vehicles from different movements observe different delays impacted by the traffic light plan. This paper analyzes delay fairness among various vehicles at intersections. We refer to three cities: Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg and Seattle with a total number of over 5100 intersections. We present an intuitive methodology to compute delay fairness based on Gini index, a common fairness measure in economics. We evaluate the fairness based on real traffic data and provide insights on the relationship of fairness with day hours and traffic demand. We also examine real changes in traffic light plans that occurred in practice to check whether improving delay is often aligned with increasing fairness.
