Citizen-Centric Signal Control Through Occupancy-Aware Person-Delay Minimization: A Simulation-Based Study of Multimodal Urban Corridors

Signal-control decisions affect private-car occupants, bus passengers, and pedestrians, whose delays are not represented equally by a vehicle-only criterion. This study evaluates an occupancy-weighted phase-selection heuristic and a separate mass-override mechanism in a simplified two-intersection corridor inspired by Cluj-Napoca. The revised numerical evaluation uses a documented reconstructed implementation that replaces the original evaluation. Six controllers are compared under four demand scenarios using 300 independent random seeds paired across controllers. The comparisons include vehicle-delay control with a capacity-aware pedestrian-service target, a multimodal unit-weight controller, and person-delay control with and without mass override. An additional 50 sensitivity design cells use 60 paired seeds each. In the reference scenario, the combined policy reduced mean accrued person delay relative to the pedestrian-aware vehicle-delay comparator by 17.03 s/person, with a simultaneous 95% confidence interval of 14.55–19.51 s/person. The incremental reduction attributable to mass override was 15.46 s/person, with a simultaneous 95% confidence interval of 13.70–17.22 s/person. However, fixed-time control produced lower aggregate person delay in three of the four scenarios. Occupancy, pedestrian demand, service capacity, and group representation affected the results. The contribution is a reproducible evaluation of the separate components and limitations of a transparent control heuristic. The findings concern synthetic, finite-horizon simulations and do not establish global optimality, validated occupancy sensing, or readiness for field deployment.