Traffic Congestion in Kathmandu City

The population of Kathmandu is more than 1 million making it one of the densely populated cities of Nepal. Therefore, the residents of Kathmandu suffer severely from the problem of traffic jams during the morning and evening rush hours as the area covered by road is only 7.72% of the total land of the city. This congestion peaks at office time which is from 9:30 am – 10:30 am and 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm and available resources has not been able to manage it.
The main problem is the city’s roads are very narrow and over the years the number of vehicles has continuously risen, hence causing a lot of congestion, a lot of time wastes and astronomically high costs. Traffic management in the city has been handled by a manual traffic control system which has proved to be inefficient in managing the increasing traffic demand. In the context of Nepal, Nepal Traffic Police are responsible head for controlling daily traffic. The traffic operation in Kathmandu is based on the traditional method of employing traffic officers on the road and manually controlling intersection signals. This approach was convenient when the city had a smaller number of vehicles and population. Even though there has been great effort from traffic officers, the lack of automated systems and the use of manual signal control has further increased the congestion issue. As we know, countries around the world have been advancing in traffic management systems with the implementation of data-driven analysis, but our country has been lacking in this part. The current challenge faced by Nepal Traffic Police is the unavailability of automated traffic signal timing which can work according to real-time situation. Another challenge faced by the organization is the lack of real-time traffic data for data-driven analysis. This has a severe impact in the country’s economic sector as I have mentioned earlier about fuel wastage. Therefore, the implementation of data-driven technology is expected to solve all these problems for the sake of a better quality of life for the residents of Kathmandu. A system that tends to adjust signals in real time based on actual traffic conditions must be implemented. This implementation ensures even distribution of traffic throughout the network and reduces congestion during peak hours.