From Tom Vanderbilt’s blog:
“Level of Service” is a staple of traffic engineering. … It sounds clinical, inoffensive, and with its A through F letter grades, it fixes itself easily in the public mind. Says the parent: What, little Johnny’s getting an F? Well, we need to make improvements! Says the engineer: This facility has a Level of Service F. Well, we need to make improvements!
The “level of service” designation is a descendant of the strand of efficiency-minded engineering that came out of the Progressive age, a time which, as Peter Norton notes in his book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City an important transformation took place:
“Once a public space for mixed uses, and ruled by informal customs, the street was then becoming a motor thoroughfare for the nearly exclusive use of fast vehicles—especially automobiles.”
Engineers went from counting people on streets to vehicles; and the key, seminal traffic engineer Miller McClintock went from arguing that “street capacity can be increased effectively by regulating traffic” to, once he had accepted funding from Studebaker, arguing for the “greater provision of street area [for automobiles].”
LOS is a classic case by which a bland bit of technical jargon conceals an entire ideology: Namely, that the purpose of a street is to move as many vehicles as possible, as quickly as possible.
Full post here.
