Paper No.

667

S. No. Study Estimated Capacity of Varying Types of Bidirectional Roads

vii HCM (2000) United States of ● Capacity was 1700 PCUs/hour for each direction of travel and normally
America would not exceed 3200 PCU/hour for both directions of travel.
viii Taiwan Area Highway Capacity ● Capacity of two lane bidirectional interurban roads of Taiwan was found
Manual (2001) to be 2800 PCU/hour.
ix Sachdeva (2003) on Indian Roads ● Capacity of single lane, intermediate-lane and two-lane roads as 700,
2000 and 2700 PCUs per hour respectively.
x Chandra and Kumar (2003) again ● The capacity of a 7.2 m wide road was estimated as 2818 PCUs/hour.
studied on Indian Roads
xi Chandra (2004) on Indian Roads ● The capacity of two lane roads was 3140 PCUs per hour under good
surface condition (Roughness = 2500 mm/km) was determined as 3140
PCU/hr which is near to the value given in HCM (2000).
● The capacity reduced by 300 PCU/hr when surface unevenness enhanced
by 1000 mm/km.
xii Reddy et al (2003) and Velmurugan ● The capacity of a single lane road on plain terrain is in the range of 6000
(2010) on Indian Road network - 7500 PCUs/day, which gives a design service volume of 3000 - 3700
PCUs/day.
● The capacity of a two lane bi-directional road with earthen shoulders
on plain terrain is around 31,000 PCUs/day which yields DSV of
12500 - 16000 PCUs/day, which was in close agreement with
IRC:64-1990
xiii Chandra et al. (2010) on Indian ● The capacity value obtained by the authors was in the range of 2000 to
Roads 2300 PCU/hr for shoulder width variation of 1.5 to 2.0 m.

Chandra (2004) and Arasan (2008) attempted to
determine PCUs for different vehicle types operating
on different typologies of roads namely interurban and
urban roads in India. From the above studies, it was
again established that PCU of a vehicle type is not a
constant value as was proposed earlier in IRC:64-1990
and IRC:106-1990 for interurban and urban roads
respectively. It changes with all factors influencing the
behavior of vehicles in the traffic stream. In this context,
Chandra and Sikdar (2000) formulated an equation to
calculate the PCU factor of a vehicle type based on
space occupied by a vehicle type on the road and its
speed with respect to the passenger car. Moreover, it
was felt that the dynamic PCUs evolved from the above
studies in the case of mid block road sections are not
sufficient to understand the complete variation in PCU
for a vehicle type. Therefore, a new concept of Stream
Equivalency Factor (Se) was introduced by Dhamaniya
and Chandra (2013) to take care of dynamic nature
of PCU. Se is defined as the ratio of flow in PCUs per
hour to the flow in vehicles per hour which is given in
Equation 1.
Se =  ... (1)
The factor Se is an overall equivalency factor for the
entire traffic stream. It is correlated with traffic volume
and its composition on the road.
Chandra (2015), based on the exhaustive review of the
earlier studies conducted on interurban highways in
India, concluded that Green shield’s model of traffic
flow is more suitable for Indian traffic conditions
than any other model and PCU is very sensitive to
traffic composition and traffic volume on the road
and hence the use of a single set of PCU factors for
different vehicle types may lead to erroneous results.
In the end, transportation and highway professionals
can look to follow the realistic capacity values evolved
in Indo-HCM (CSIR - CRRI, 2017) while undertaking
evaluation of existing road facility or planning of
any new road facility while undertaking evaluation
of existing road facility or planning of any new road
facility without relying on adhoc capacity values as well
as procedures given in relevant Indian Roads Congress
(IRC) document i.e. IRC:64-1990 or without need to
directly adopting the capacity values given in HCM of
USA (2010) or manuals of other Asian countries i.e.
Chinese HCM (2005) or Indonesian HCM (1999). It
is to be noted here that the values given in the above
referred manuals evolved for other countries cannot
be translated for Indian traffic conditions through
evolving adjustment factor alone as these would not be
replicating Indian traffic scenario. In this context, this
paper provides some of the major highlights of Indo -
HCM study of CSIR - CRRI (2017) derived relevant
to interurban bidirectional roads covering varying
typologies.
3. BASE CONDITIONS FOR CAPACITY
ESTIMATION
The basic parameters of traffic flow, namely speed,
volume and density are used to estimate the capacity of

Journal of the indian Roads Congress, July - September, 2017 61