The Modern Vision of the Performance Assessment of the Roads: the Global Level of Service (GLS) as a Tool for Its Determination

In Italy in the first nineties started a process of transformation of the Public Administration (PA) aimed to improve the citizen satisfaction about the utilities offered by PA itself. In this process, the topic of the public utilities quality and the central role of citizen, either as service user and as strategic resource to evaluate the correspondence of given services to real needs is particularly important. One of the most used tool is the measurement of the user satisfaction level, or, in other words, the measurement of the level of quality perceived by the users, the so called “customer satisfaction”. As this regard in the last decade, in Italy as well as in the rest of Europe, many Ministerial Directives and Laws have been issued in order develop systematic methods to survey quality of services. The road performance measurement tool presented in this paper, called GLS (Global Level of Service), perfectly fits this context. It is a method to provide the interurban roads with synthetic quality indexes. More than 50 indicators have been identified. They have been gathered into 6 groups concerning safety, comfort, travel time, services, environment and traffic conditions. For each of them a single numeric parameter can be associated to evaluate the quality of service of the road sections. This parameter can be calculated with respect to 3 different points of view: users, owner/manager and infrastructures crossed countries inhabitants. Thus this tool goes beyond the customer (user) satisfaction intents. An application of the methodology is also reported