Development of Level of Service Criteria for Evaluation of Bicycle Suitability

Abstract

A bicycle is one of the key modes of transport in small Indian cities, where two-thirds of all trips are made by either bicycle or by walking. Despite having a substantial bicycle share, none of these cities have safe bicycle infrastructures. As a result, bicyclists share the road space with various types of motorized traffic, putting them at higher risk. It is thus necessary to evaluate the quality of bicycle travel from the users’ perspective and develop appropriate mitigation measures. To this end, the main objective of this paper is to develop a tool to evaluate the quality of bicycling at roadway segments with respect to several roadway-related physical and functional characteristics and land use. For the stated purpose, user perception on bicycle suitability was collected using a six-point Likert scale in several homogeneous roadway segments in Kharagpur, a small Indian city. Subsequently, bicyclist perceived level of service (LOS) criteria were developed by formulating Ordered-Probit (OP) models, which can capture the ordered nature of the dependent variable (perceived bicycle LOS of a segment). Results indicated that among the variables measured in continuous scale, on-street parking (ONP) proportion has the strongest influence on bicyclist-perceived LOS followed by motorized volume and the 85th percentile speed of motor vehicles. Among the categorical independent variables, both pavement condition score and land-use type influence the bicyclist-perceived LOS significantly. Subsequently, bicyclist-perceived LOS criteria were also applied to assess bicycle suitability of a set of roadway segments in Kharagpur.