Level of Service Criteria on Indian Multilane Highways based on Platoon Characteristics

Increasing traffic flow demand has forced transport planners to increase the number of lanes of highways to provide good maneuvering facilities to the road users. As a result, several highways in India have been widened for capacity augmentation and quality improvement. Thus, it has become essential to evaluate the operating condition of multilane highway facilities. The level of service (LOS) is a qualitative term describing the operational condition of a transportation facility. In order to evaluate the operating condition under a facility, the authors need some quantitative measure for defining the level of service. The quantitative basis is referred as a measure of effectiveness (MOE) for that facility. The LOS concept devised by US-Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) (Transportation Research Board (TRB), 2010) has got limitation for direct implementation in heterogeneous traffic system prevailing in India. A well- defined LOS criterion for heterogeneous traffic conditions is essential for Indian traffic perspective. An attempt has been made in the study to evaluate the level of service considering the platoon parameters observed on Indian Multi-Lane Highways as MOE. For the proposed study, total six Multilane highway sections have been considered across the country. A critical headway of 5 seconds is adopted for evaluation of different platoon characteristics such as follower rate, follower density, percentage follower and platoon rate. Threshold values of LOS are proposed based on follower density, which is found to be the most suitable parameter for mixed traffic conditions. Three operational conditions namely free flow, stable flow and constraint flow are classified using k-means clustering technique.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB40 Standing Committee on Highway Capacity and Quality of Service.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Chatterjee, Sudipa
    • Roy, Debashish
    • Chakraborty, Sandip
    • Roy, Sudip Kumar
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2017

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 13p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01630548
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 17-05026
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Mar 28 2017 11:38AM