A Utility-Based Method Of Multimodal Level Of Service Evaluation For Urban Transportation System

Level of service is the satisfaction degree that the road user get from the traffic condition and operation, while multimodal level of service emphasizes that the road level of service evaluation should not only focus on auto mobile users but all users of different types (auto mobile users, bus users, bike users and walk). Therefore, multimodal level of service refers to the satisfaction degree that the traffic condition and operation meets to the user of different types, which means that the multimodal level of service will consider travel demand split.The fundamental problem existed in traditional level of service is that it is always auto-centric. It evaluates transportation system performance primarily based on the driving comfort and overlook other alternative modes with many other benefits, which means that the consideration of car is always over other travel modes. In the new era of green transportation, the traditional level of service evaluation may not suitable. So there is an urgent need of developing a new level of service evaluation method (Multimodal level of service evaluation) so that auto mode and the other modes including bus, bike and walk can be evaluated comprehensively. The evaluation of level of service should focus on’travelers’instead of ’drivers’. Furthermore, currently used level of service measures may not adequately reflect perceived level of service by travelers. Focus on these two issues, a new utility-based method is developed to evaluate the urban transportation system level of service that take all travel modest into account. The utility theory and optimization model are used to establish and solve the problem. The proposed multimodal level of service measure is based on aggregated utility of all travelers on the transportation system, which is estimated by travelers’utility function that considers impact factors such as travel time, travel cost, convenience and comfort degree. As an initial effort, the objective of the paper is to develop the optimization model to calculate the threshold of maximum value of the level measure which is determined based on the total utility of the travelers in the transportation system. Also, the method can be used to evaluate the influence of traffic planning measurement and new project to the traffic system and travel modes choice.Then two examples are shown and numerical analysis results presented in this paper. Under the given total travel demand, this paper can get the maximum utilities of all travelers for a corridor and a transportation network respectively. And the aggregated utilities can be regarded as the threshold of multimodal level of service. The result verifies the feasibility of using the proposed measure for multimodal level of service evaluation. Also, the method can be the guidance of urban traffic planning.