[B’ Spokes: An axiom of government: What gets measured, gets done. So we need to redefine what is the Level of Service (LOS) for a given roadway:
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What Is It?
Transportation engineering and planning have generally measured LOS as a ratio of actual traffic
volume to the theoretical capacity of the road. There are two solutions DOTs can try to ensure LOS
steers consistently towards high value investments: use LOS standards differently, and redefine them.
For instance, DOTs often measure LOS at the time of peak delay during the day and use that to decide
if capacity additions are warranted. In the extreme example where service is bad for one hour of the
day and then good for the remainder, a large amount of money may be spent to solve a problem that
only exists for a very short time, while the road is hugely underutilized for the rest of the time, making
the benefits low and the costs high.
Another important consideration is context. Some places are heavily congested because they are very
desirable places to be. These places are often centers of economic activity that rely on a high volume
of travel and may be harmed by wider roads or faster traffic. Since one of the goals of transportation
investments is economic development, it may be counterproductive to “fix the traffic” by means of
capacity expansion. Instead, it may be better to improve service by ensuring that people who choose
to travel by walking, biking, or transit can do so. However, traditional measures of LOS don’t measure
these changes, rendering these improvements virtually worthless as a means of improving the
measured LOS.
To capture the impacts of multi-modal improvements, LOS can be redefined to account for the
capacity and utilization of all modes. Measures of pedestrian, bicycling, and transit LOS mirror roadway
LOS measures in that they evaluate the adequacy/availability of the facility for accommodating existing
and new travel. These generally include measures of capacity such as the presence, density, and
extensiveness of sidewalks and bike lanes; measures of connectivity, frequency, quality, and size of the
transit system; and measures of utilization, such as people per square meter, volume of cyclists, and
number of public transportation users.
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https://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/documents/the-innovative-dot.pdf
