Empirical Travel Time Reliability Assessment of Indian Urban Roads

This chapter focuses on the performance evaluation of Indian urban roads from the perspective of travel time reliability. Travel time data on two important road corridors of Surat city were collected using a license plate matching technique for this purpose, and the performance of these corridors was assessed using and various travel time reliability metrics. Statistical models were developed to identify the functional relationship between space mean speed (SMS) and planning time index (PTI). As Indian traffic comprises of multiple vehicle classes, an attempt was made to analyze the effect of vehicle composition on the average travel time using artificial neural network (ANN)-based approach. It was observed that travelers must consider the higher cushion time while planning a trip on both of these corridors. The developed regression models demonstrated the strong functional relationship between SMS and PTI on both of the sections. Developed ANN models revealed that the percentage of car and auto-rickshaws present in the traffic stream significantly affects the average travel time along with the total volume of traffic.