As one of the biggest problems on a global scale, traffic congestion has increasingly raised a growing concern among many people. Traffic congestion has several definitions for example Benekohal( 1997,P.2) suggests ‘ congestion is that traveler is immobility; it is trains waiting to either station or terminal; it is long lines of stopped or slowly moving vehicles on a freeway, suburban highway or city street’ In accordance with the definition, people can appreciate that traffic congestion is both a social product and a common phenomenon. It is very clear from the above quotation that traffic congestion leads enormous costs which is associated with social as well as economic aspects to the world. Having accentuated the extreme importance of traffic congestion, not only developed countries but also developing countries have invested huge amount of funds to utilize variety of technologies solving this problem. This essay will explore some approaches used by different countries to tackle traffic congestion respectively and identify both their advantages and disadvantages in detail.
To begin with, the definition of traffic congestion shows that it imposes significantly large costs upon human society which contents both natural, social and economic costs. Take Australia for example, ‘ the value(2002) for the costs of environmental damage due to air pollution vary greatly between the different emission species ranging from $3 per tonne for carbon monoxide up to high costs of $342 000 dollars per tonne for particulate matter.’ (2007, Estimating urban traffic and congestion cost trends for Australian cities, Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics, Canberra) and on the global scale, ‘ The total congestion" invoice" for the 85 areas in 2002 was $63 billion, an increase from $61 billion in 2001. The 3.5 billion hours of delay and 5.7 billion gallons of fuel consumed due to congestion are only the elements that are easiest to estimate.’ ( Jeff Paniati, The FHWA associate administrator for operation, 2004, operational solution to traffic congestion, United States Department of transportation – Federal Highway Administration, viewed 8 August 2008, <
http://www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov> According to above quotation, it is extremely clear that traffic congestion is definitely one of the most expensive problem associated with almost every aspect of people’s life and it is high time for all the countries including both developed countries and developing countries to take actions combating with traffic congestion.
Firstly, in the western society, nearly all the developed countries which are suffering from the traffic congestion have paid substantially more attention to how to solve this problem efficiently. The improvements referred to many social aspects include not only physical facilities making travel more convenient but policies regulating the traffic sequence as well as behaviour of drivers. There are significantly various of approaches solving traffic congestion, for instance, American government have applied a modern technological strategy called Information Gathering and Sharing system which consisted of surveillance, detection cameras, traffic sensors, vehicle probes and infrastructure sensors. This information system which based on a network comprised of large number of points namely information centres that collected the different information gotten by the cameras and sensors from roads and delivered them to the main information centres or database from which every relevant information could be pick out very easily. On one hand, by using this system, the staffs of the traffic departments can measure the highway or road situation every now and then and take the rescue and persuit immediately when accidents or criminal happened. On the other hand, this system allow the traffic policemen of every states to use the traffic information gathering from other states and share the relational information with other departments of the government even the overseas governments. So it is much more convenient to monitor and control nearly everything on the streets and the vocational ability of American traffic departments were greatly improved due to this modern technological information gathering and sharing system. However, every coin has two sides, the downsides of this new technology are also obvious. First of all, the biggest disadvantage of this system is its cost of building which is exceedingly expensive and the cost of its maintainability for what the government must invest large amount of expenditure continuously and over a long period. Secondly, another disadvantage of this approach is the risk of machines. No machine or technology can work correctly forever therefore, having been broken, people can not get the exact information from the facilities and no one knows when the equipments should have been broken so people must undertake the risk.
In the meantime, the developing countries which faced the same situation also have invested substantially to tackle traffic congestion. Take China for example, Chinese government was keen on finding some efficient methods to solving traffic congestion continuously. For instance, because of the huge number of pedestrian, SHANGHAI government has built lots of pedestrian bridge and walk way for the walkers which is a very good approach solving the traffic problems, however, those bridges and special ways have large costs and heavy structure which made the city crowded and disordered. China has the largest population of cyclists and government made a lot of extra lanes which can isolate the cyclists from the cars or pedestrian or buses to reduce the risk of cngestion for cyclists from other transports although the extra lanes made up the extra room and extra building costs. As to the buses system, the government made efforts too, such as increasing the number of buses, increasing the capacity of buses, increasing the route of the buses and so on. On one side, more buses or longer route made the usage of public transport resources more efficient and reduced the number of private cars but on the other side, they also may lead to the congestion. The last but not the least, to reduce the traffic congestion, Chinese government tried to control the car use by using the drive licence system. This system can control the number of drivers namely the number of cars whereas controlling car ownership by vehicle licence contradicted the improvement of national vehicle industry from which the government could get thousands of hundreds of dollars of tax to increase the city quality. So the developing countries try to keep the balance between advantages and disadvantages of the approaches solving traffic congestion as well.
In conclusion, in accordance with above, traffic congestion leads large amount of costs to not only the natural environment but also the human society and results to many negative affects to people’s life. It is no doubt that fighting with traffic congestion is essential. Both developed countries and developing countries are trying to find some efficient methods to solving this worldwide problem and the approaches they found had many positive effects as well as disadvantages. In my opinion, according to the globalization, all the countries should handle this very big problem together such as having some international meeting periodically and sharing traffic congestion solving experience with mutually. By doing that, countries could find much more efficient ways to dispose traffic congestion much more perfectly.
