Pedestrian Level of Service at Intersections

Abstract

The study was aimed at improving the road conditions and designing roads in the future providing enhanced safety for pedestrians. In order to measure the safety of a pedestrian on a certain road , pedestrian level of service(PLOS) of that road was used as a parameter. Highway Capacity Manual (HCM, 2000) has characterized LOS as "a quality measure depicting operational conditions inside an traffic stream, by and large as far as such administration measures, for example, speed and travel time, flexibility to move, movement interferences, and convenience and comfort.The HCM has defined six levels of service, A-F; describing operations from best to worst for each type of system. A quantitative model based on the Chinese road intersections was used to determine the pedestrian level of service(PLOS).The factors affecting the safety of pedestrians that were considered in the model were right-turning vehicle volume from the street parallel to the crosswalk (pcu/h), permissive left-turning vehicle approaching from the street parallel to the crosswalk (pcu/h), right-turning bicycle volume from the street parallel to the crosswalk(bic/h), permissive left-turning bicycle approaching from the street parallel to the crosswalk (bic/h), through bicycle volume on the street parallel to the crosswalk (bic/h).The data were collected using a video camera. After collecting the data, regression analysis was done in Microsoft excel to find the value of the coefficients of these factors. The range of the PLOS was also found using k-mean clustering in MATLAB. The pedestrian level of service were then calculated for the respective study areas and classified into A-F according to their values.