Beyond Efficiency: Integrating Resilience into the Assessment of Road Intersection Performance

Highlights: What are the main findings? Intersection resilience is as critical as efficiency, revealing that conventional performance metrics alone are insufficient under disruptive conditions. A combined heuristic–microsimulation framework effectively evaluates both operational performance and robustness, capturing vulnerabilities such as power outages. What is the implication of the main finding? Urban planners and policymakers can prioritize intersection designs that preserve mobility during climate-related disruptions, strengthening urban resilience strategies. The integrated methodological approach provides a transferable tool for other cities to support evidence-based decisions on resilient intersection planning and investment. Extreme weather events, such as storms, pose significant challenges to the reliability and efficiency of urban road networks, making intersection design and management critical to maintaining mobility. This paper addresses the dual objectives of traffic efficiency and resilience by evaluating the performance of roundabouts, signalized, and two-way stop-controlled (TWSC) intersections under normal and storm-disrupted conditions. A mixed-method approach was adopted, combining a heuristic framework from the Highway Capacity Manual with microsimulations in AIMSUN Next. Three Polish case studies were examined; each was modeled under alternative control strategies. The findings demonstrate the superior robustness of roundabouts, which retain functionality during power outages, while signalized intersections reveal vulnerabilities when control systems fail, reverting to less efficient TWSC behavior. TWSC intersections consistently exhibited the weakest performance, particularly under high or uneven traffic demand. Despite methodological differences in delay estimation, the convergence of results through Level of Service categories strengthens the reliability of findings. Beyond technical evaluation, the study underscores the importance of resilient intersection design in climate-vulnerable regions and the value of integrating analytical and simulation-based methods. By situating intersection performance within urban resilience, this research provides actionable insights for policymakers, planners, and engineers seeking to balance efficiency with adaptability in infrastructure planning.