Determination of Volume Capacity Ratio (VCR) and Level of Service (LOS) of the Bottleneck Area of Doña Josefa Bridge in Gapan City

Abstract

Vehicular traffic congestion is an emergent problem in many developing cities since the steep increase in the number of vehicles does not match the pace of increase of road infrastructures. The City of Gapan, a 4th class city in the province of Nueva Ecija, Philippines, is one of the cities which experiences heavy traffic flow daily. The main objective of this research is to determine the Volume Capacity Ratio (VCR) and Level of Service (LOS) of the bottleneck area of Doña Josefa Bridge in Gapan City. VCR measures the amount of traffic on a given roadway relative to the amount of traffic the roadway was designed to accommodate while LOS is used to qualitatively define the operating conditions of a roadway. This study utilized Traffic Volume Survey to gather data. The data were tallied, tabulated, and computed to determine the Peak Hour Volume (VCR) and Passenger Car Unit (PCU) that would be used to compute the Volume Capacity Ratio (VCR) and determine the Level of Service (LOS). The results showed that during peak hour throughout the seven days of the week, the VCRs fell under the bracket of 0.7-0.84. The Level of Service are determined to all be at LOS D which means that the road experiences moderate to heavy traffic; traffic is approaching unstable flow with nearly all drivers restricted and the service volume is at tolerable capacity. From the results, the researchers concluded that there is moderate to heavy traffic in the bottleneck area of Doña Josefa Bridge and thus, remedial measures and traffic management methods are needed to be implemented over the next five years to alleviate the congestion.