It is ideal for transportation planning applications such as roadway design, congestion management programs and traffic impact studies.
Some of the benefits to using ICU over delay-based methods include greater accuracy, and a clear image of the intersection's volume to capacity ratio.
The review board of the ICU continue to make changes every year in order to incorporate all of the new criteria required.
Delay based methods and simulation such as HCM, PTV Vistro, Synchro, and SimTraffic should be used for operations and signal timing design.
[4] In short, the ICU method makes the traffic capacity design a much easier and simpler task.
This method is similar to taking a sum of critical volume to saturation flow ratios (v/s), yet allows minimum timings to be considered.
This is not always easy to achieve and therefore much care is given to the signal timings and geometry in order to get the LOS to be better than E. HCM method is seen today as the more popular alternative when it comes to capacity analysis.
[3] Some signal timing software like PTV Vistro and Synchro report ICU Level of Service.
This integration allows users to analyze small to large signalized urban networks in a modern traffic analysis software platform.
[5] Using the ICU methods in PTV Vistro can be extremely useful for planning level analyses and help users determine intersection size and capacity.
It simply calculates the ultimate capacity based on a fully protected, optimized signalized timing plan at a cycle length of 120 seconds.
The ICU method of finding the LOS is a tool that is often emphasized in the TIS reports to show how the intersections can be made better to accommodate the new flux of traffic.