Traffic Signal Synchronization on a One-Way Street

We consider a one-way street that intersects n one-way (side) streets. Traffic approaching the first street is steady as are the flows on all side streets. Traffic signals are idealized as perfect on-off switches and traffic is treated as a fluid moving with a constant velocity on the main street. Total delay and total number of stops are evaluated for several types of signal coordination schemes. Some conclusions are:1. For any given common cycle time and given splits at each intersection, there is a choice of offsets (phases) that simultaneously minimizes both the total delay and stops, but it is not necessarily the one that produces a “through band” of maximum bandwidth.2. There are signal settings for which some signals operate on half or a third the cycle time of other lights, which give a main street delay equal to that for the optimal common cycle time setting but give less delay to the side street.3. Similar models are commonly used to find maximum through bands for two-way traffic, but it is not obvious that this is a suitable objective even for one-way streets.