Level of Service Criteria of off-street Pedestrian Facilities in Indian Context using Affinity Propagation Clustering

To know how well roadways accommodate pedestrian travel or how they are pedestrian friendly it becomes necessary to assess the walking conditions. Estimation of PLOS criteria is very important as this is the first step of LOS analysis but this is not well defined in Indian context. The analysis followed in India is basically an adaptation of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) 2010 methodology. However, the defined ranges of various measuring parameters mentioned in HCM 2010 are more suitable for developed countries. In this research, an in- depth study has been carried out to define PLOS criteria of urban off-streets facilities in developing countries having heterogeneous traffic flow conditions. Defining LOS is basically a classification problem and to solve it Affinity Propagation (AP), a very recently developed cluster algorithm is used. Inventory details and speed data are collected from two important cities (Bhubaneswar and Rourkela) of Odisha state, India having less than a million populations, through the application of video camera.After the collection of data, based upon average pedestrian space, flow rate, speed and volume to capacity ratio (v/c), six categories of PLOS are estimated. PLOS ranges found from this study for six categories (A-F) using average pedestrian space are (in m2/pedestrian) >15.67, >(13.84-15.67), >(10.67-13.84), >(7.63-10.67), >(5.08-7.63), ≤5.08, flow rate are (in pedestrian/sec/m) ≤0.065, >(0.065-0.081), >(0.081-0.096), >(0.096-0.116), >(0.116-0.141), > 0.141, speed are (in m/pedestrian) >1.51, >(1.32-1.51), >(1.13-1.32), >(0.91-1.13), >(0.69-0.91), ≤0.69 and volume to capacity ratio (v/c) are ≤0.4, >(0.4-0.57), >(0.57-0.76), >(0.76-0.9), >(0.9-1), >1 for PLOS categories A, B, C, D, E and F respectively. The PLOS ranges defined in this study are proportionately lower than that mentioned in HCM (2010) because of highly heterogeneous traffic flow and low volume of pedestrian movements in less than a million population cities in Indian context.