Traffic Congestion Effect

A STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF TRAFFIC CONGESTION ON WORKING PEOPLE (Bangalore)

INTRODUCTION

Traffic Congestion is considered to be one of the major handicaps of modern life in big cities. Time spent waiting due to traffic snarls is unproductive and affects a nation’s GDP. The economic growth can be well captured in the growth of automobile sectors with the increase in vehicular production which means that there will be an increase in vehicular population on roads. The policy makers have to be ahead of the curve by better metropolitan and urban planning to ease traffic congestion.

According to Adebiyi (2011), traffic congestion is caused partly by road users themselves apart from the external conditions of the road. The effects of traffic congestion

The chief aim of traffic management is “to make the best use of the existing transport system”; this aim is approved by most people and especially by economists, who like to see higher productivity achieved with negligible capital expenditure. Traffic management includes all physical measures designed to influence the movement of traffic on an existing network. If there were no traffic management, drivers would try to find their own best path through the network and to move along that path as expeditiously as possible. They would have freedom to use the network to their greatest advantage, both for moving and for parking, subject to the impediments they imposed upon one another.

Traffic management is by its very nature a restriction upon this freedom. Every piece of traffic management is a restriction upon the movement of some traffic. These restrictions fall into four categories:

• Route restrictions: All one-way systems and no-entry regulations prevent drivers from taking the routes they would otherwise have chosen;

• Right of way restrictions: The vehicular traffic is hampered due to traffic signals and other priority regulations at intersections which prevents traffic from

Essentially, demand is created when the need for travel between origin and destination arises. Demand therefore strongly depends on socio-economic and population factors. Another important factor influencing demand is the relative cost of road travel as well as the availability of alternative means of transport. Other aspects that influence demand for road travel are availability of parking and the social perception of car versus public transport travel.

LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

• Latent demand: The traffic we see does not represent the full demand for peak travel at the prevailing monetary cost since congestion itself causes many potential rush-hour vehicle trips to be cancelled, diverted or rescheduled.

• Congestion is mispriced. Because drivers do not pay for the time loss they impose on others, they make socially inefficient choices concerning how much to travel, where to travel and what route to take.

• The total time spent in the traffic not only includes time and delay cost to the driver, but it also includes fuel cost, vehicle operating cost, pollution cost etc which are not taken into account due to the complexity of its calculation.

• The total travel time does not only depend on the four factors discussed in the model. It also depends upon a number of other factors such as speed, number of vehicles on road, weather conditions, slow moving vehicles, uncontrolled on-street parking