Advances in traffic signal data monitoring systems are providing engineers with a big-data solution for designing, monitoring, and optimizing traffic signals. In its most modern applications, a traffic signal’s exact sequence of events prior to and during a collision will be recorded with granular detail and accurate time-stamp and positional information. Meanwhile, a wide variety of GPS-compatible systems are in common use in automobiles, commercial vehicles, and even pedestrian and bicyclist applications. Devices often record coordinate positional data, instantaneous speed, and time-stamp information, which can be combined with the traffic signal data logger records to establish the specific movements of involved parties through space and time. The combination of these two data technologies is applicable to answering common questions involving signalized intersection collisions, including which driver had a green signal, or how the incident was affected by the user responses to signal change intervals, phasing, and pedestrian signal operations.

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