Travel Time Reliability as a Level of Service Measure for Urban and Inter-Urban Corridors in India

Abstract

The present study demonstrates the application and usefulness of travel time reliability as a level of service (LOS) measure for urban arterial and inter-urban highway corridors on Indian roads. For travel time estimation, automatic vehicle license plate number data were collected through TrafficMon system. This system is a fully video-based enforcement system designed to measure the speed of vehicles passing in view of the camera, and read the vehicular license plate number. This system was implemented at the entry and exit side of the identified three study corridors and data were collected during morning and evening peak periods. The data were analysed and various travel time reliability measures were evaluated. The study also attempts to correlate reliability measures such as planning time (PT), buffer time (BT), planning time index (PTI) and buffer time index (BTI) with volume-to-capacity ratio which is the most widely used LOS measure for Indian roads. Analysis of results indicated that at LOS B the travel time of intercity highway was 40–46 sec/km, whereas it was 64–80 sec/km and 75–135 sec/km for urban uninterrupted and interrupted corridors respectively. The planning time for LOS B was more on urban arterial corridors when compared to inter-urban corridor for the same width of the carriageway. The upper limits of LOS B for PT were 132 sec/km and 63 sec/km for uninterrupted urban corridor and intercity highway corridor respectively. Other parameters of reliability like PTI and BTI were also evaluated and their values for different ranges of volume-capacity ratio were presented for identified corridors.