Determination of pedestrian level of service for walkways: METU campus example

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, İnşaat Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2015

Öğrenci: PINAR KARATAŞ

Danışman: HEDİYE TÜYDEŞ YAMAN

Özet:

While studying the level of pedestrian activity on the campus of Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, pedestrian flow maps, counted manually and multiple times a day, showed changes in directionality and volumes of pedestrians during a day. Also, a student survey revealed that, in overall, 60% of the participants found the METU campus walkways sufficient, while the remaining 40% found it insufficient. Students stated that existence of sidewalks on both sides, infrastructure, protection against to weather, and etc. had an important effect on increase in walking. To encourage a greater modal shift to walking on the campus, first, it is important to understand and evaluate walkability and walking concepts. While walkability assessment studies mainly deal with perception and built environment aspects, engineering studies focused on evaluating pedestrian level of service (PLOS) based on flow and infrastructure capacity measures. This perspective difference and methodological details resulted in requirement of a wide range of data, which vary greatly based on the scope of the study. PLOS evaluations for METU Campus walkways are performed using Highway Capacity Manual (HCM), Gainesville and Trip Quality methods, which resulted in contradicting ratings. Comparison of the results revealed insights about the strength and weaknesses of each method, and led to a series of recommendations to improve walkability assessments, which was the main goal of this study.