Improvement of hazardous road intersections and midblock sections: study of Mirpur road and airport road

Abstract

Each year as reported by Bangladesh Police, more than 4000 persons are losing their lives in road traffic accidents in Bangladesh and many more sustain disabling injuries. In economic terms, road accidents in Bangladesh cost more than Tk. 5000 crore (US $ 850 million) which is nearly 2 percent of GDP. Metropolitan Dhaka accounted for about 23 percent of all reported accidents. Such unsafe conditions and losses as prevailing in roads and streets of metropolitan Dhaka dictate urgent need for research and investigations aimed at alleviating road distresses and improving overall traffic safety. If adequate attention is not given to find the reasons of accident and implement mitigation measures now, it will be very uncontrollable situation in future. The identification and improvement of hazardous road locations is an important task of traffic safety management and very effective measure to reduce the traffic accident frequency and the losses of traffic accident. The maximum reduction in road trauma and its associated costs will result from a concentration of resources on known problems at known locations. Thus hazardous road locations (HRL) program forms the most cost-effective way of road safety improvements. Previously some other performance evaluation studies in the context of road safety were done for several intersections in Dhaka City. But to identify the HRL for both intersections and midblock is very much unique at the context of Dhaka urban roads. Among all the methods, at this study four methods are used to identify the black spots. The processes are Critical Number/Rate Method, Crash frequency method, Crash Severity Method and Equivalent Property-Damage-Only (EPDO) Methods. Due to lack of volume data some processes cannot be applicable for Dhaka City roads. In case of the Intersections for Mirpur road HRL was identified as Shamoly and for Airport road it is Airport. For midblock of Mirpur road it is Shamoly to Technical section and for airport road it is Banani 1 to Banani 11. These were identified by the over mentioned processes and by analyzing all the midblock and intersection it is found that these are most critical by maximum methods. So later on field survey was completed to these locations and many factors considering with road, environment, users and also traffic condition were found to be responsible. By field visit the current safety hazardous of the selected spots (both intersection and midblock) are identified. All the intersection and midblock are full of many difficulties especially very inadequate provision for the pedestrians. All the footpaths and foot over bridges are illegally occupied by the shopkeeper at every spot. All the spots are also lacked by the road sign and markings. Here in Bangladesh, the enforcement is not so strong that the drivers will obey the rules. Apart from these with the help of MAAP5 database the important features of these intersections and midblock were identified. Most common feature of all of these are pedestrian is the most vulnerable for all the locations. In case of collision type also pedestrian is the most victimized category. And maximum of the accidents were happened during nice weather and good lighting condition. So it means that, there are some other factors involved for most of the cases except external factors. At last, one frame work for a whole corridor for identifying the accident black spots can be developed and it can be as followed.