LEVEL OF SERVICE OF URBAN ROADS BASED ON USERS PERCEPTION

Level of service (LOS) is a qualitative measure of traffic flow from t he users' perspectives. This paper presents a new methodology to find LOS of urban roads by taking users' perceptions and analyzing them thr ough fuzzy set theory. Speed, volume and acceleration noise (defined a s the standard deviation of accelerations) are taken as the evaluating criteria, The six categories of LOS A to F of the Highway Capacity Ma nual are assigned linguistic terms. The users have been divided into t wo age groups. Their perceptions, recorded through primary surveys, ha ve been used to establish membership functions for different fuzzy set s and to arrive at importance factors assigned to them. Four important corridors of movement in the Metropolitan City of Madras formed the b ackdrop of the study.