Students from Department of Urban & Infrastructure Engineering, NED University will conduct a research to ascertain the level of traffic congestion in Karachi and quantification of its cost. The Toyota Research on Traffic Congestion (TRTC) is the first of its kind on this critical issue, which is affecting the people belonging to all walks of life, being launched in collaboration with Indus Motor Company (IMC).
A formal launching ceremony of the project was held at NED University on Monday which was attended by representatives of Government of Sindh, Karachi Administration and High ranking officials of Sindh police and traffic department. On the occasion, Chief Guest Vice Chancellor NED University, Abul Kalam said that under current social and economic frameworks, there were no feasible policies that could reduce traffic congestion to zero, however, for appropriate analysis it was 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. CEO IMC Parvez Ghias while speaking on the occasion said that the traffic congestion had a number of negative effects including idle time for motorists and passengers; delays, which resulted in late arrival for students, employees, entrepreneurs causing losses to business.
He said that in the developed countries, the quoted annual cost of traffic congestion was $40 billion for the year. Dr Mir Shabbar Ali, Chairman Department of Urban & Infrastructure, NED said that under the project methodology, the 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.
Project Co-ordinator, Former IG Sindh Police, Niaz Siddiqui said they were embarking upon a new research project which aimed at determining the economic costs of traffic congestions through specific stretch of national highway. The study would help identify the bottlenecks that obstructed the smooth flow of traffic besides assessing its impact in economic terms, he added.
The findings of the research project would be shared with all stakeholders, he said. National Highway Authority (NHA) Sindh Traffic Police, Government of Sindh; City District Government Karachi; Port Qasim Authority; Pakistan Steel Mills; Landhi Association of Trade and Industry; Bin Qasim Association of Trade and Industry and all other stakeholders would be invited to actively participate and support this project, the organisers said.