Methodology for evaluating the level of service (LOS) of toll plazas on a toll road facility

Evaluation of a toll plaza's operational efficiency is an area of traffic engineering that has been excluded from professionally recognized engineering application documents used for development and planning such as the Highway Capacity Manual. Numerous measures of effectiveness (MOEs) are available to evaluate a toll facility for its level of service (LOS) including density, V/C ratio, and delay. These as well as other MOEs were considered in the development of the LOS methodology for toll plazas. Based on field research and data analyses, delay is recommended to be the most credible MOE for evaluating the LOS at a toll plaza. Because there are various ways to measure the delay including average, total or a percentile, these were all tested to determine which measure would be most appropriate for toll plazas and the most accurate representation of the operational conditions. It was found that the 85th percentile of the cumulative individual vehicular delays captured the delay with the best precision.; Because processing tolls at a toll plaza creates the delays experienced by a driver, service time was investigated further. Service time was examined to determine the level a driver begins to feel discomfort and inconvenience at a toll plaza. A number of toll officials responded to a questionnaire relating to service time. Fourteen seconds was concluded to be LOS A and subsequent intervals concluded from this value. This methodology was then applied to data collected from actual toll plazas.; An extensive database of traffic analyses for three mainline toll plazas in Orlando, Florida, representing different plaza configurations and various levels of electronic toll collection (ETC) usage was used to validate the new LOS methodology and test the transferability.; Also, to examine other toll plaza configurations and operational conditions, a number of simulation scenarios from the TPSIM toll plaza simulation model were completed.; The transferability of the new method for determining the LOS for a toll plaza was tested on the University Toll Plaza. University Plaza was found to have similar operational characteristics when compared to days from the other plazas with the same LOS. Furthermore, service time was found to be a direct influence on the delay confirming the conclusion of use as a determinate value for the LOS hierarchy. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...