Traffic control agencies (TCA), including police officers, firefighters or other traffic law enforcement officers, who override automatic traffic signal control, are crucial to mitigate non-recurrent traffic congestion, caused by planned and unplanned events. The question remains unanswered is how well TCA performs, compared to state-of-practice automatic traffic signal control. This paper assesses the performance of TCA-based manual multi-modal traffic signal control under special events. First, an interview was designed to understand TCA’s control rules and state-of-practice of manual traffic signal control. Second, a simulation-based experiment was conducted to record their control actions given multi-model traffic flows, including buses, pedestrians and passenger cars. Third, a TCA’s performance index is developed by comparing to the optimal solutions from an online optimization model, which assumes rich vehicle information is available to obtain the best control strategies. It is shown that manual traffic control can significantly improve the control performance, even be close to that of optimized timing plan, though large variations are observed during the study.
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