Abstract:
The benefits they provide for urban poor and getting a self-reliance job of street vendors were studied by different Scholars. But very little was done in quantifying their impact on-road performance in terms of different measuring factors. This paper assessed the socio-economic background of street vendors and their impact to road performance in terms of travel speed, Capacity and Pedestrian LOS. Four potential cluster road sites were selected based on the volume of street vendors they accommodate. For each arterial road, a sample road segment of 50m long in which the existence of street vendors supposed to create a greater problem was selected.
Street vendors prefer these activities since they have no chance of doing a better job which is formal. Most of them earn less than 100 birr per day but they have a parental responsibility of taking cares upto thr.ee heads per house. The Bahir Dar city administration gives responsibility for the city illegal act prevention office for controlling the street vending activity. The city administration takes an intuitive measures such as evicting them off the road and providing free vending road zone. But it doesn’t prevent them from proliferating.
Static vendors on the footpath encroached the walkways, thus pedestrians queuing and further spillover to the street was a common phenomenon. Hence, the effect of these vendors were measured by the pedestrian LOS and incorporating displaced Pedestrian as an independent variable for the models. Whereas the dynamic vendors within the motorways by hawkers and NMV. The SPSS was used to quantify the relative impact of static and dynamic vendors on the performance of road. The travel speed of each road segment was modeled by flow, entry/exit vehicles, and SV (combined effect of Pedestrian, Hawker, and NMV) as an independent variable.
The climax reduction in speed during a higher intensity of SV was recorded to be 55% at Azewa and Ayer Tena road. Whereas, existence of SV reduce the capacity flow by 41% at Azewa road. The PLOS were highly deteriorated at peak existence of static vendors.