Determining urban street levels of service in developing cities: An effective solution for sustainability of automobile users

Abstract

This study has developed an empirical model to assess Automobile Users’ Level of Service (ALOS) under heterogeneous traffic flow conditions. Several geometric and traffic operational attributes are taken from 83 urban street segments. The proposed methodology incorporates an Ordinal logit analysis to model the ordered response of participants and to identify under what service category a segment is offering service for automobile use. The prediction performance of ALOS model was assessed in terms of pseudo R2 values (0.744, 0.786 and 0.466 for Cox and Snell’s, Nagelkerke and McFadden R2 respectively). The findings from this research shows that, pavement condition index and on-street parking activities were observed to have the highest positive and highest negative influence on satisfaction level of drivers. Drivers are also dissatisfied due to interruptions caused by roadside commercial activities, oppositely moving traffic encounters etc. As a result of which, 72.55 % of street segments are offering ALOS categories of “C” or below. So, the highway authorities must take action by focusing on above issues for betterment of driver’s riding quality.