Would a traffic survey help tame congestion?

For the first time in Dhaka’s history, the government decided to conduct a survey of the city roads to determine their capacities and the actual volume of vehicles in an effort to devise a better traffic management system and consequently reduce intolerable traffic congestion.

At the moment, no government agency has any idea how many vehicles are moving through the city every day; which areas are the most congested at specific times; or even how many private cars, public transportation vehicles, and auto-rickshaws the existing roads can accommodate.

As such, the Traffic Division of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP), which is in charge of managing traffic, struggles to do so in the absence of accurate data and patterns of vehicle movement and is forced to control the traffic using the insight that comes from experience.

Often, it is seen that some parts of the city become paralysed for hours, while in other parts, traffic stays normal. This happens because of the lack of systems developed to distribute the pressure of vehicles. As a result, city dwellers are wasting thousands of working hours being stuck on the roads.

According to DMP Additional Police Commissioner (Traffic) Md Munibur Rahman, in order to improve the situation, they need to be aware of a few traffic-related factors, such as the total number of vehicles travelling each hour, the volume of traffic in the city’s entry and exit points, and the capacity of the roads.

“Concrete data would help in the efficient deployment of the required number of traffic police officers. Then we’d know exactly where to focus our attention,” he said.

In this context, the DMP traffic division in the last year sought assistance from the Accident Research Institute (ARI) of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) to conduct the survey.

A panel of experts started working on the issue and prepared a draft technical and financial proposal which was handed over to the DMP on Thursday.

According to the proposal, the survey would take two years to complete, either all at once or in phases, Buet sources said.

“If we could hold accurate data on the traffic flow capacity of the roads, then traffic management would be easy. Besides, the government will know how many vehicle registrations they should allow every year in line with the capacity,” Prof Md Hadiuzzaman, director of ARI, said.

“Once the survey is done, this would be the first step in developing a road capacity manual for all highways and roads across the country as well,” he added.

He said that the survey was not the solution but would help pave the way towards a solution.

DMP official Md Munibur Rahman said they would like to start the survey as early as possible.

Dr Md Asif Raihan, an assistant professor of BUET and one of the key members of the experts’ team, told The Business Post there are 31 exit-entry locations for vehicles in Dhaka. They want to survey the points as well as 20 other locations.

“There are a few types of roads—four-lane two-way divided roads, two-lane two-way divided roads, and two-lane two-way divided or undivided roads facility. We need to calculate their capacity first and then the volume to capacity ratio,” he said.

“Dhaka’s traffic moves in an interrupted flow. The major place of concentration is intersections, where vehicles get stuck mostly,” he said.

The data of the vehicles will be collected manually as well as by CCTV cameras.

In the Bangladeshi context, a traffic survey is a complex thing to process as along with motorised vehicles, manual ones like rickshaws, vans, and bicycles share the same roads.

“We need to calculate the speed of vehicles on every type of road during peak and off-peak hours, the relation between the peak and off-peak hours, and the traffic density during the hours,” said Dr Mohammad Asif Raihan said.

“After finding out the common pattern, the team will also check if the place has parking space, exit and entry points, the capacity of the road’s footpath, etc,” he said.

In 2009, the government formed a committee to bring discipline to roads and recommendations to solve the traffic problems in the capital.

A task force was formed headed by the then home minister to implement 111 point recommendation of the committee.

In 2021, the task force decided to conduct a traffic survey in the capital.

A BUET survey this year found that commuters on their way to work in Dhaka city have lost around Tk 140 crore in working hours to traffic each day.

Most wage earners commute to offices or businesses between 7:30am and 10:30am and travel back home between 4pm and 8:30pm. As a result, these are the windows when traffic congestion in the capital is at its worst. Around 60 per cent of all vehicles in the capital hit the roads at these times.

The study said that every day, 25 million trips are being made over shorter and longer distances, and office goers account for 44 per cent of the trips.