Students from the NED University of Engineering and Technology’s Urban and Infrastructure Engineering Department will conduct research to ascertain the level of traffic congestion in the city and quantification of its cost.
The Toyota Research on Traffic Congestion (TRTC) project is the first of its kind on this critical issue, which is affecting the people belonging to all walks of life is being launched in collaboration with the Indus Motor Company.
A formal ceremony to launch the project was held at the NED on Monday. The event was attended by government representatives.
The chief guest, NED University Vice Chancellor Abul Kalam, said that under the current social and economic framework, there are no feasible policies that could reduce traffic congestion to zero, however, for appropriate analysis it is required to have profound basis for congestion valuation.
He said the research conducted by dedicated team and students of NED under the TRTC would be beneficial for industries to ascertain the role of traffic congestion in their overall costing/budgeting and effectiveness of congestion reduction strategies.
IMC CEO Parvez Ghias said that traffic congestion has a number of negative effects including idle time for motorists and passengers; and delays that result in late arrival for students, employees, entrepreneurs resulting in lost business. In developed countries, the quoted annual cost of traffic congestion was $40 billion for the year, he added.
Urban and Infrastructure Department Chairman Mir Shabbar Ali said that under the project methodology, research would be completed in different stages including identification, data collection, data processing and analysis and congestion estimation and its valuation.
He said that the data processing, analysis and other steps would involve various techniques like extraction of traffic volume from video clips, traffic congestion index, scenario based congestion cost estimation and all relevant international standard research parameters.
“We are embarking on a new research aiming to determine the economic costs of traffic congestion through specific stretch of national highway. The study will help identify the bottlenecks that obstruct the smooth flow of traffic besides assessing its impact in economic terms. The findings of the research project will be shared with all stakeholders,” the project coordinator, former Sindh IGP Niaz Siddiqui, said.
All other stakeholders including Sindh Traffic Police National Highway Authority, Sindh government; City District Government Karachi; Port Qasim Authority; Pakistan Steel Mills; Landhi Association of Trade and Industry; and Bin Qasim Association of Trade and Industry would be invited to actively participate and support the project.
