Framework for Estimating Travel Time, Distance, Speed, and Street Segment Level of Service (LOS), based on GPS Data

Abstract Street characterization might be done through its distance, travel time, average speed, flow or density. In this paper, the Level of Service (LOS) has been used as an alternate measure to characterize street segments, LOS categorizes the traffic status according to quality of service of an urban street, considering three categories: few traffic, moderate congestion and congested. The proposed framework uses three GPS-Data fields (Date-Time, Latitude, and Longitude) to estimate Travel Time, Distance and Speed at two different levels of analysis: GPS-Data traces and street segments. At segment level of analysis average speed has been used to calculate LOS scale and characterize street segments with a LOS, color and performance. As a case of study, a subset of 1012 GPS-Data traces, gathered from Beijing, China, were analyzed. This trajectory data corresponds to 90 minutes of a Taxi. The implementation of this framework showed that, using only three GPS-Data fields, traffic information about individual vehicles can be estimated and used to characterize street segments with the average speed and its corresponding LOS.