Journals Proceedings

Abstract

The increment in the traffic flow demand has forced transport planners to increase the number of lanes of highways in order to provide better functional and operational facilities to the users. Measures of effectiveness (MOE) of a road system is one of the critical issues faced in highway planning and management. Level of service (LOS) is a qualitative measures describing the operational condition of a transportation facility. The LOS concept devised by US-HCM is unfit for direct implementation in Indian heterogeneous mixed traffic condition. This is mainly due to the heterogeneous traffic conditions and vastly unique driver behavior found on Indian highways. Thus a well-defined LOS criterion for heterogeneous traffic condition is utmost necessary. The vehicles prevailing under heterogeneous traffic vary widely in static and dynamic nature. An attempt has been made in this study to define the LOS criteria per lane basis on multilane highways in terms of traffic density, considering the distribution of traffic across the lanes. LOS being a classification problem has been obtained by Clustering technique in the present study. K-means clustering methods have been employed to classify LOS in six categories.