Major problems in the urban areas caused by Traffic Congestion & their proper solutions: Dillee Ram Dangi

Civil-062 Batch /IOE, Pulchowk Campus Email: drdangi4@yahoo.com

Introduction
Basically, road transport is the major mode of transport which connects the whole country in to the network establishing a new communication. It improves the whole economy growth of the country. Besides the different advantages of the road transport human are facing different problems due to the lack of its proper management, repair & maintenance. Among the different problems of road transport, traffic congestion is the emerging problems in the urban areas nowadays. Some genuine issues about the problems & solutions of traffic congestion are tried to discuss in this article.

Traffic congestion:
Traffic Congestion is the presence of delays along a physical pathway due to the presence of other users. This is the major problems of transportation in urban areas. Due to this, everything's are delaying: road users can't reach to the destination, lack of services at the times people need, lack of services on the routes people need. Due to the traffic congestion in the different intersections the free flow of the vehicles is about to 15 km/hr in the Kathmandu Valley.

Effects of Traffic Congestion:

All traffic congestion is caused by excess demand. When the sum of the traffic on an entrance ramp and the traffic on the adjacent main lanes exceeds the capacity of the lanes downstream from the entrance ramp, a queue will form. The queue is quite sensitive to the amount of excess demand. For example, if the demand on a four-lane freeway is 8,400 vehicles per hour and the capacity in a bottleneck is also 8,400 vehicles per hour, we expect

unstable operation with very little queue. If the demand rose to 8,600 vehicles per hour, which is an increase of only a little over 2 percent, 200 cars would stack up into a queue in an hour. Each lanes 50 cars of queue, if we assume maximum, or jam, density to be about 250 cars per mile, would extend not quite a quarter of a mile. The speed in that queue would be a little less than 10 mph on average (2,400 vehicles /hour at capacity divided by 250 cars /mile equals 9.6 mph). A 10 percent increase in demand would create a mile of additional queue. Therefore, demand only has to exceed capacity by a few percentage points to create severe congestion.

Fig: Traffic congestion in Kathmandu

Major Causes of traffic congestion:

Due to the haphazard moving of bicycles, bikes, taxis without obeying traffic rules. No sufficient wide roads to meet the demand of increased vehicles Due to the negligence about traffic rule and regulations.

Unnecessary strikes & Chakka jam in the road. Due to the crossing of the road by pedestrian from anywhere. Unnecessary delay of vehicles in the intersections.

Crowded streets and increased pollution caused by everyone driving their individual cars. Each car waits longer in traffic because of the amount of cars on the street, therefore increasing the amount of time spends on the road. Each car contains only a few people, yet its engine could power more people's journey.

Solutions:

Segregation of the vehicles as per their speeds & their sizes and provide different lanes for different category vehicles. Increase roadway throughput to meet the increased traffic demand.

Make approach with fixed route transit, flexible time program.

Make approach with the implementation of Intelligent Transportation System like Incident management, Corridor management, advanced vehicle system, advanced traffic control, Real time ride matching, integrated transit & fair system.

Improvements to the streetscape, such as better footway lighting, bus shelters and general landscape management such as removing graffiti and abandoned cars. Proper management of lighting system at intersections. Strictly obey the traffic rule & regulations. Declare the end of strikes in the roads. Make a slightly larger vehicle with a slightly larger engine, fill it with people going to a similar destination and decrease the traffic (and the amount of time spent on the road) as well a decreasing the overall amount of pollution because of the higher percentage of people per vehicle/engine. Discourage the small vehicles and increase the High Occupancy Vehicles.

Conclusions:

In Government site, Department of Roads with alone takes the responsibility to manage the roads. But in fact only DOR can't minimize the traffic congestion. If we think about this problem and can realize it is our genuine issue and become careful about it, the problem will be tends to minimize. To obey traffic rule & regulation is the responsibility of the civilized road users. To take the new vision targeting the traffic congestion problems is the government's responsibility. Tinkune - Suryabinayak road has just extended to six lane roads and declared such road as a traffic congestion free road. Like this, the concerned body should be attentive for other roads for new lane & proper maintenance in time.