Analysis of Performance of Road User Services on Two Toll Roads in Pune Region

There are about six toll roads on the prominent highway corridors in and around Pune region. The roads have been commercially operational for quite some time and the toll is levied on cars, buses, light and heavy commercial vehicles using the project highways and are slated to reduce travel time and improve connectivity of Pune and Mumbai to other parts of the region. These toll roads mainly towards the cities – Mumbai, Satara, Nashik and Solapur – carry huge amount of traffic everyday and generate lots of toll revenue for the road operators and contribute to the regional economy to a considerable extent. However, there has been a strong discontent among travellers that the system is not able to manage the mandated user services thereby performing poorly on various road user service indicators such as safety, security, wayside amenities, etc. The present study aims at developing service quality indices to analyse and rank some toll roads which are currently working virtually under similar operating conditions in the Pune region of Maharashtra State. Two toll road segments of National Highways (NHs) passing through the region are considered for the study. Since the road user service quality is an Abstract concept, the statistics are developed mainly through people perception on various service parameters and opinion scores assigned to them. The index thus forms the basis for decision making and system improvements particularly in service aspects to the extent of road user satisfaction.