Modeling and Evaluation Bicycle Level of Service for Links
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Date
2018-12
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
In urban parts of the world, share of bicycle mode of transport is declining due to lots of
difficulties and dissatisfactions. These situations make the transportation system
unsustainable in the long run. In addition to this, currently, bicycle transport system has not
given more attention by the transport engineers and planers to improve the facility.
These days, there is no methodology widely used by engineers and planners in Ethiopia that
will allow them to determine how compatible an urban roadway for allowing efficient
operation of bicycles. As efforts to make environment friendly, bicycle should have more
attention towards the improvement of facilities and number of users. Therefore, lots of time
and energy used to develop highly reliable Bicycle Level of Service (BLOS) model that
provide the transportation professionals for a suitable technique systematically to assess the
bicycle service qualities.
This particular study focuses to develop new BLOS model and evaluate the performance of
the bicycle transportation along the link that can used by transportation professionals and
others to evaluate the capability of specific roadways to accommodate both motorists and
bicyclists. Because of the geographical nature of the area and the number of bicycle user, this
research selects Bahir Dar city as case study area. Thus, all data that are collected represents
the desired complexity and variability in the attributes of multilane roads in city of Bahir Dar.
Those data for the model development obtained and collected from questioner, recorded
videos, and actual geometrical and traffic data measurements.
This research helps in assessing the factors affecting bicycle level of service through links
and evaluating a method to determine BLOS for links under heterogeneous traffic conditions.
Moreover, the developed bicycle level of service model based on the users’ perceptions of
links. This model incorporates perceived safety, comfort, and operations of the bicycle users.
A sensitivity analysis carried out to understand the effects of influencing variables on the
BLOS and the study identified passenger car unit has the highest influence on BLOS.
Finally, the resulting model is highly reliable in its applications and has a high coefficient of
determination value (R
2
= 0.972) with mean observations and provides a measure of the
users’ perspective on how well a link's geometric and operational characteristics meets the
satisfactions of the users.
Description
Keywords
Bicycle Level, Service, urban roadway, Bicycle Level of Service (BLOS)