Evaluating Pedestrian Level of Service at Middle East Technical University METU Campus

Date

2014-10-21

Author

Tüydeş Yaman, Hediye
Karataş, Pınar

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Walking is a major non-motorized mode encouraged for sustainability. Its preferability depends on trip characteristics (purpose, length, etc.) as well as available infrastructure aspects (existence of separate bike/pedestrian roads, their capacity, etc.). Similar to vehicular traffic, it is important to measure the Pedestrian Level of Service (PLOS) for walking infrastructure. The literature consists of different methods for PLOS, and Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) reserved a chapter about it. Some methods use sidewalk area (or width) to define pedestrian capacity, and consider exclusions for interruptions due to landscape or other built environment components. The pedestrian friendly design of the METU campus with a large-capacity alley in the middle offers a big potential towards a more sustainable campus goal, but it is important to measure the current PLOS for METU campus roads and sidewalks, which is the main focus of this paper. Gainesville Method showed that except for the alley, pedestrian sidewalks do not always provide high levels of PLOS. But, HCM method considers pedestrian counts in relation to infrastructure capacity, which still produces higher PLOS values, even at the poorly designed sidewalks due to low pedestrian volumes. Also, pedestrian count results revealed that there was a strong directionality in the pedestrian flows during the morning and evening periods, from/to dormitories and the bus stops, as expected; thus, PLOS values have to be estimated in a time-dependent manner. High pedestrian flows around the Campus cafeteria and Cultural Center where motorized traffic is also high, requires retrofitting to improve pedestrian safety.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/87301

Conference Name

11th International Conference on Advances in Civil Engineering (ACE), 21 - 25 October 2014

Collections

Department of Civil Engineering, Conference / Seminar

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Citation Formats

H. Tüydeş Yaman and P. Karataş, “Evaluating Pedestrian Level of Service at Middle East Technical University METU Campus,” presented at the 11th International Conference on Advances in Civil Engineering (ACE), 21 - 25 October 2014, Istanbul, Turkey, 2014, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/87301.