ANALYSIS OF OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE MEASURE FOR MULTILANE INTERURBAN HIGHWAYS

Abstract

The rapid growth in Indian population has caused an unprecedented growth in vehicular traffic on highway due to such increase in vehicular volume the operational condition are deteriorating over the highway so, this deteriorating quality of service become the point of concern for traffic engineer and planner to operate the highways under given level of service. In India very less research is done for LOS of multi-lane due to which no guidelines are available for evaluating LOS. So therefore the objective of this study is to evaluate performance measures on multilane road for heterogeneous traffic and to assign threshold values of performance measure for all class of LOS. For this research the traffic data is collected from three sections of four-lane divided road namely NH-58, S.H-27 and S.H-17 of Madhya Pradesh state. Five popular performance measures used by other researchers in the past were considered and relationships were developed between them and traffic flow out of all these performance measures none of them is found to be suited to define the operational condition of multi-lane roads. Therefore, the area occupancy which is a surrogate measure of density consider the length, width and speed of vehicles was used as performance measure and its threshold values for different class of LOS were assigned. Additionally the the ranges of degree of saturation and density are assigned for all categories of LOS and were compared with US HCM 2010.