Evaluation of Urban Street Service Quality in Developing Countries Using Soft-Computing Techniques

Abstract

Indian road traffic characteristic is mostly heterogeneous in nature. Heterogeneousor mixed traffic means presence of non-motorized vehicle in a large proportion comparedto motorized vehicles simultaneously on the road, which is very unlikely to the developed countries. This study also tries to define the ALOS score ranges to categorize the perceived and predicted ALOS scores. First, several factors which plays significant role in determination of ALOS are short-listed based on previous research study. For example, traffic volume, width of the road, pavement condition, land use pattern and so on. Then exclusively geometric and traffic data has been collected from seven important cities of India (out of which data of three cities are taken from secondary source). Then by some statistical tests like Pearson’s correlation test, significant independent variables are fixed. The ALOS scores are classified using SOM in ANN to define the ranges of LOS categories ‘A – F’. The HCM method (NCHRP) to determine ALOS is applied on the same data set and the outputs are compared with the target (actual) values, a great deviation is observed.