Modelling of Bicycle Activity on Midsized City Road Segments in Indian Context

Abstract

Bicycle comfort level rating (BCLR) is a qualitative measure that characterizes operational conditions of bicyclists and their level of comfort within the geometric and traffic flow conditions of a road. Most of the widely accepted international BLOS models are proposed for homogeneous traffic and cannot be adopted to measure the service quality of roads under the influence of heterogeneous traffic flow. Due attention was paid in this research on heterogeneous traffic flow conditions and a Bicycle Comfort Level Rating (BCLR) model was developed which can be adopted in Indian midsized cities. Several factors (based on road features, traffic flow characteristics, on-street parking, driveways and land use of adjoining area etc.) affecting the comfort level of cyclists were considered while developing the model. Required data set were collected form 60 segments of three Indian midsize cities namely; Bhubaneswar, Rourkela and Kottayam. In perception survey participants with a good cross-section of age, experience level, sex and education were participated. Relationship was established between the factors which contribute to the comfort level of bicyclists and perceived comfort level of users in the modeling process. The model was developed by stepwise multiple linear regression in SPSS V20.0 satisfied the significance criteria with correlation coefficient (R square = 0.757). The t-tests of the predictors are highly significant (p < 0.05). Four clustering techniques namely; FCM, HAC, K-Means and K-Medoid were applied to classify the BCLR model output into six categories (A-F) and K-medoid clustering was found to be the most applicable one in the present context. The model was compared with HCM BLOS model (for link) and two other widely accepted models namely, Bicycle Compatibility Index (BCI) model and FDOT BLOS model; and BCLR model was found to provide far better results than other models in Indian conditions