Level of Service Criteria for Pedestrian Facilities in Urban Indian Context

In sustainable transportation system, walking is an indispensable mode; but unfortunately, not enough attention is paid to the development of safe and supportive infrastructures for pedestrians. Pedestrian Level of Service (PLOS) is a complex expression, which represents the operating condition of pedestrian facilities and satisfaction levels of pedestrian experience while using these facilities. In this regard, this study aims at defining PLOS categories for four pedestrian facilities such as offstreet pedestrian facility, on-street sidewalk, crosswalk at signalized and un-signalized intersections by using both qualitative as well as quantitative data sets. Perception data, traffic characteristic data and road geometric data have been collected from 10 midsized cities such as Bhubaneshwar, Rourkela, Cuttack, Ranchi, Raipur, Tata, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Tirupati of India. An inventory questionnaire was prepared and total 2655 pedestrian’s real time sense of satisfaction data were collected from interrupted pedestrian facilities like onstreet sidewalk, signalized and un-signalized intersection. Variables like platoon size, traffic score, safety score, comfort score, maintenance score and aesthetic score are proved to be statistically significant on pedestrian’s satisfaction model fitting. Perceived satisfaction score models were developed with the help of multinomial logit, ordinal logit and ridge regression modeling approaches and among all ridge regression models were found to be more suitable. Outputs of perceived satisfaction score model were used as the dependent variable in PLOS model development. Four parameters such as pedestrian space, flow rate, speed and volume to capacity (v/c) ratio are considered to classify PLOS categories for off-street pedestrian facilities. From the analysis of on-street sidewalk, it has been observed that variables taken like width of separation, motorized vehicle volume, non-motorized vehicle volume, obstructions and speed of vehicles were having significant effect on pedestrian satisfaction levels. PLOS score model was develope technique and results show that non-motorized vehicle volume has the highest effect i.e. 60% on the PLOS model for on street sidewalk. In case of crosswalk at signalized intersection pedestrian delay model has been developed by the combination of waiting time delay and vehicle interaction delay. Taking 85th percentile speed of vehicles, volume of through moving vehicles, left turning motorized and non-motorized vehicles, permissible right turning motorized and non-motorized vehicles and pedestrian delay as independent variables, PLOS score model for signalized intersection has been developed. Having significance value R2 of 0.986, PLOS model was validated. At un-signalized intersection, observation shows that satisfaction level of pedestrians significantly depends on volume of motorized and non-motorized vehicles, volume of pedestrians and crossing delay at the intersections. Crossing behavior of pedestrians has been analyzed to estimate the critical gaps (the actual gap pedestrian need to cross) by applying equilibrium probability method and maximum likelihood methods. To evaluate pedestrian delay at crossings, estimated critical gaps, number of interacting vehicles and crosswalk length are taken into considerations. Using various significant parameters as independent variables and pedestrian real-time perceived satisfaction scores as the dependent variable PLOS score model has been developed for un-signalized intersection. Defining the PLOS criteria for urban pedestrian facilities is basically classification problem and cluster analysis is found to be more suitable technique for solving this problem. Self-Organizing MAP (SOM) in Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Affinity Propagation (AP) and Genetic Algorithm Fuzzy (GA-Fuzzy) clustering are the three methods employed in defining PLOS criteria in this study. Six PLOS categories (A-F) which are having different ranges of pedestrian space, flow rate, speed and volume to capacity (v/c) ratio for off-street facility and PLOS score for on-street sidewalk, crosswalk at signalized and un-signalized intersection are defined. As the study used a wide range of data and validation shows the significance of the models, therefore, these proposed models have remarkable potential for wide application in defining service levels for pedestrian facilities in developing countries having heterogeneous traffic flow condition