Article

Why the typical U.S. traffic engineer's "level of service" is a misnomer and a bad idea - What it actually measures is the level of comfort for drivers, who tend to like streets that have very few other cars and where they can drive fast without interruptions. To get a "good" LOS (i.e., an A or B), you needed to widen streets, add lanes, get rid of on-street parking, limit crossings, add turn lanes, etc. In the US, LOS was never intended to measure how well a road performed for all interested parties (e.g., the people who lived near it and worried about high speeds, the kids who wanted to cross it to get to school, the bicyclists who wanted to use it to get to work, transit users, etc.).