Why no crosswalk at Saarc Fountain intersection
HATS off to DMP for their timely drive against jaywalkers. Many people have supported this drive, while others have opposed it and said that there should be crosswalks on Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, especially at the Saarc Fountain intersection. It is time to analyse why there should not be any crosswalks on this road, especially at the said intersection.
Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue is one of the major arterial roadways in Dhaka, which are high capacity roadways serving longer-distance traffic to deliver traffic between different centres as smoothly as possible.
Major arterials are the backbone of a traffic network. Traffic congestion on a major arterial may cause congestion in other roads, which may lead to a collapse of the entire traffic system. This is why it is important to ensure smooth flow of traffic on these roadways at all times, which means ensuring that the flow of traffic on these roadways has less interruption.
The volume of vehicular traffic and pedestrian traffic is very high at the Saarc Fountain intersection, especially the number of left-turning vehicular traffic on all four sides. To ensure safety of pedestrians, it is better to provide an exclusive phase for them as it will reduce the conflict between pedestrians and left turning vehicles.
For example, one minute green time could be exclusively provided to pedestrians from all sides of the intersection after every five minutes. Because of the large number of pedestrians and the long distance they need to walk to cross the intersection, one minute is not enough to clear those waiting to cross the intersection. At least a few minutes of exclusive green time is required to allow all or at least most of the pedestrians to cross the intersection. Research has shown that a five minute waiting time could be too much and may lead them to violate the signal.
Providing one minute exclusive green time for pedestrian movement after every five minutes of vehicular movement means that there will be no vehicular movement for ten minutes in an hour. For a major arterial roadway this will mean huge overall delay to the vehicles on this road and on the nearby roads, causing serious traffic congestion in the whole network.
Thus, providing a crosswalk with exclusive pedestrian green time at this location does not benefit the pedestrians or even vehicular traffic. In fact, it increases the delay time for both pedestrians and vehicles. Therefore, instead of demanding crosswalks at this location and other areas on this roadway, one may demand road crossing facilities such as footbridges or underpasses with ramps or escalators.
The writer is a transportation engineer working in Thailand.
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