Most experienced drivers are comfortable, roads remain safely below but efficiently close to capacity, and posted speed is maintained.
Examples are a busy shopping corridor in the middle of a weekday, or a functional urban highway during commuting hours.
It is a common goal for urban streets during peak hours, as attaining LOS C would require prohibitive cost and societal impact in bypass roads and lane additions.
The 2010 HCM incorporates tools for multimodal analysis of urban streets to encourage users to consider the needs of all travelers.
Stand-alone chapters for the bicycle, pedestrian, and transit have been eliminated, and methods applicable to them have been incorporated into the analyses of the various roadway facilities.
This research developed and calibrated a method for evaluating the multimodal LOS (MMLOS) provided by different urban street designs and operations.
[3] The HCM defines LOS for signalized and unsignalized intersections as a function of the average vehicle control delay.
The 2000 HCM provides skeleton coverage of modern roundabouts, but does not define LOS: the measure of effectiveness is the quotient of the volume to the capacity.
Among them are: The LOS concept was first developed for highways in an era of rapid expansion in the use and availability of the private motor car.
Since then, some professors in urban planning schools have proposed measurements of LOS that take public transportation into account.
More stringent LOS standards (particularly in urban areas) tend to necessitate the widening of roads to accommodate development, thus discouraging use by these alternatives.
This standard is not considered a good measure[citation needed] of pedestrian facilities by the planning or engineering professions, because it rates undesirable (and hence unused) sidewalks with an LOS A, while pedestrians tend to prefer active, interesting sidewalks, where people prefer to walk (but rate a worse LOS on this scale).
To rectify this and other issues, The National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) is conducting a project to enhance methods to determine LOS for automobiles, transit, bicycles, and pedestrians on urban streets, with particular consideration to intermodal interactions.
[The London guidance] is based on comfort and takes into account user perceptions as well as observed behaviours".
It also implies that poor LOS can be solved by increased capacity such as additional lanes or overcoming bottlenecks, and in the case of transit, more buses or trains.
It does not deal for instance with cases where there is no bridge across a river, no bus or train service, no sidewalks, or no bike-lanes.
The individual countries of the UK have different bodies for each area's roads, and detailed techniques and applications vary in Scotland, England and Wales, but in general the practice is the same.
Rural and urban roads are in general much busier than in the U.S, and service levels tend to be to the higher end of the scale, especially in peak commuting periods.
In Australia LOS are an integral component of Asset Management Plans, defined as the service quality for a given activity.