THE CAUSES OF TRAFFIC CONGESTION

This is my thought on traffic congestion, as well as my group assignment and we have to write about 20 pages for each person.

TRAFFIC CONGESTION

            Nowadays, traffic congestion seems to be a common phenomenon which people consider it as the wind that come and go without they barely notice its presence. They always complain about being stuck in the gridlock but, they do not do something to solve it. Even though, they do come out with a solutions, but the solutions are not really reliable to be implemented. In Malaysia, traffic problem are quite troubled to everyone who possesses a vehicle such as car, van, and motorcycle.

Moreover, this situation keep growing severely until the society almost not notice its existence. Those who are always experienced traffic congestion have considered it as the routine they have to face daily. They also feel annoyed with this situation because they have to waste their valuable time queuing in the road and the frustration of crawling along instead of moving at normal driving speeds.  Before we go further into a long discussion, it is wise action to define what is congestion really stands for. There is no single, broadly accepted definition of traffic congestion. One of the principal reasons for this lack of consensus is that congestion is both:

• A physical phenomenon relating to the manner in which vehicles impede each others’ progression as demand for limited road space approaches full capacity.

• A relative phenomenon relating to user expectations vis-à-vis road system performance.

Both operational and user perspectives are important in understanding congestion and its impacts. This report does not seek to select one approach to defining congestion over the other; they clearly both have uses when seeking to develop congestion management strategies. Ideally, urban transport policies should be developed on the basis that congestion is related to both:

• The behaviour of traffic as it nears the physical capacity of the road system.

• The difference between road users’ expectations of the system’s performance and how the system actually performs.

Generally, congestion is a situation in which demand for road space exceeds supply. Congestion is the impedance vehicles impose on each other, due to the speed-flow relationship, in conditions where the use of a transport system approaches capacity. Congestion is essentially a relative phenomenon that is linked to the difference between the roadway system performance that users expect and how the system actually performs.[1]

 Other than that, traffic congestion is a condition on road networks that occurs as use increases, and is characterized by slower speeds, longer trip times, and increased vehicular queuing. The most common example is the physical use of roads by vehicles. When traffic demand is great enough that the interaction between vehicles slows the speed of the traffic stream, congestion is incurred. As demand approaches the capacity of a road (or of the intersections along the road), extreme traffic congestion sets in. When vehicles are fully stopped for periods of time, this is colloquially known as a traffic jam.[2]

In general, traffic congestion occurs when traffic demand is greater than the capacity of the road. Traffic congestion is considered to be at extreme level when vehicles are fully stationary for long periods of time. Besides, traffic congestion can be characterized based on three factors:

1) Slower speed of vehicles

2) Longer travel times

3) Increased queuing[3]

In my opinion, traffic congestion is a situation where there is an overloaded of vehicles/transportations mediums between two points which resulted to a long queuing of vehicles and the vehicles are hardly move from its position for a long period of time. Everything that happens in this world has its own causes and this traffic situation exist due to many reasons which generally related to economy, social, development, behavior/manner, facilities, timing, transportation systems and others.

There is much information about congestion that we do not know in detail. Here are some information about based on others study.

How should congestion be measured?

Measuring congestion is a necessary step in order to deliver better congestion outcomes. However, congestion should not be described using a single metric for policy purposes. Such an approach is sure to obscure either the quantitative aspects of congestion or its relative and qualitative aspects. These two aspects cannot be disassociated and progress in managing congestion should be based on sets of indicators that capture both of these aspects. Good indicators can be based on a wide network of roadway sensors but simple indicators based on less elaborate monitoring can sometimes adequately guide policy. What is important is to select metrics that are relevant to both road managers (e.g. speed and flow, queue length and duration, etc.) and road users (e.g. predictability of travel times, system reliability, etc).

Indicators should be neutral in that they do not contain implied policy goals. In this context, the use of free-flow speeds should not be used as a direct benchmark to measure congestion policy outcomes as such an approach implicitly suggests that successful policies deliver free-flow speeds – an unaffordable goal for peak hour traffic in most OECD/ECMT cities. Free-flow speeds might be used as a benchmark of technical system performance but a better alternative might be to use median speeds or to use some other benchmark or set of benchmark values such as percentage of maximum legal speed or different speed bands.

Congestion has an impact on both the speed of travel and on the reliability of travel conditions. It is the latter that may be of greatest concern to individuals and businesses. Thus congestion management policies should keep track of travel reliability indicators. These may capture the variance in travel times or, alternatively, communicate the amount of time buffers road users have to include in their travel plans to make their trips “on time”. Insofar as these reliability indicators give an understanding of the quality of travel conditions, they are important to policymakers seeking to address the qualitative aspects of congestion.

Equally important, but more difficult to measure, is the task of identifying who is adversely affected by congestion. In cities where citizens have available (and use) quality public transport, road congestion may not concern as high a percentage of the travelling public as in cities with low quality alternatives to car use. Congestion can also have indirect impacts not captured by “on-road”-based assessments (e.g. increased inventory holdings by manufacturing and retail businesses in response to increased unreliability of travel conditions). Many non-road users are also exposed to the negative impacts of congestion. Developing a common framework for measuring the indirect impacts of congestion, the exposure of urban travellers to congestion across modes as well as including the impacts of congestion to non-road users remains a significant challenge.

Is congestion getting worse?

Congestion is increasing in many urban areas across the OECD/ECMT regions (and elsewhere) and in locations where populations and city economies are growing it is likely to continue to increase. However, it is not clear that congestion is rising equally fast across all areas in these countries; nor that the rise in traffic has followed the same patterns and has been caused by the same phenomena. In many cases, congestion has grown as cities have grown and as economic activity has expanded. Cities have grown as they attracted more people and activities, they have produced more wealth and, as a by-product, their roads have become more crowded. Congestion has grown in absolute terms in many areas but in some cases, it may not necessarily have grown in relative terms as measured by unit of economic output or per capita.

This may partly explain why some countries view urban congestion and its growth as an issue impacting on city growth and productivity and therefore of critical national importance while others see urban congestion as a “problem” that is to a degree self-regulating – especially in cases where travel alternatives are available and system performance is reliable. In some cases, national statistics clearly indicate a significant growth in congestion as measured by a degradation of average travel speeds during peak hours (as in many areas of the United States), however, in other areas average speeds have remained constant or even increased (as in France). What is clear is that in many cases, urban congestion has spread in the sense that the period of time that roads are congested during the day has lengthened – “peakspreading” is a common phenomenon in many cities – and in the geographic extent of congestion within urban areas. Likewise, many, but certainly not all, urban areas seem to have experienced degraded travel conditions in that the predictability and reliability of travel times have decreased.

In one respect, the relative rise in congestion can also be seen as a “natural” consequence of the “lumpy” nature of infrastructure provision. New road capacity can only be provided in large increments leading to a situation where new infrastructure is oftentimes underused in the short-term, well-used in the medium term and over-used in the longer term. New infrastructure provided in the 1950s through the 1980s is now often saturated with traffic and the possibilities for further large-scale expansion are often seriously constrained by the scarcity of available urban land and its costs. In some areas where there remain opportunities to expand or otherwise complete insufficient regional road infrastructure, as in the case of the greater Tokyo region or in Moscow, one can expect that a similar pattern of congestion relief, followed by traffic growth and saturation will occur - absent of any pro-active traffic management policy.

What should policy-makers know about the causes of congestion?

The proximate causes of congestion are numerous, e.g. too many vehicles for a given road’s design or intersection capacity, dynamic changes in roadway capacity caused by lane-switching and car-following behaviour. They are also invariably linked to other indirect factors such as land-use patterns, employment patterns, income levels, car ownership trends, infrastructure investment, regional economic dynamics, etc.

Generally, however, we can identify two principal, broad categories of causal factors; micro-level factors (e.g. those that relate to traffic “on the road”) and macro-level factors that relate to overall demand for road use. In this context, congestion is “triggered” at the “micro” level (e.g. on the road), and “driven” at the “macro” level by factors that contribute to the incidence of congestion and its severity. This has important implication for policy since – while congestion takes place on the roads, it is not only, nor necessarily primarily, a traffic engineering problem.

Congestion is typically categorized as either recurrent or non-recurrent

Recurrent congestion is generally the consequence of factors that act regularly or periodically on the transportation system, such as daily commuting or weekend trips. However, even recurrent congestion can display a large degree of randomness, especially in its duration and severity.

What is also clear from an examination of the causes of “recurrent” congestion across different types of road networks is the extreme vulnerability of traffic to sudden breakdowns as demand approaches the technical maximum throughput capacity on a link or in the network. When roads are operated at or near their maximum capacity, small changes in available capacity due to such factors as differential vehicle speeds, lane changes, and acceleration and deceleration cycles can trigger a sudden switch from flowing to stop-and-go traffic. Likewise, saturated intersections can quickly give rise to queues whose upstream propagation can swamp local roads and intersections.

Non-recurrent congestion is the effect of unexpected, unplanned or large events (e.g. road works, crashes, special events and so on) that affect parts of the transportation system more or less randomly and, as such, cannot be easily predicted. The share of non-recurrent congestion varies from road network to road network and is linked to the presence and effectiveness of incident response strategies, roadwork scheduling and prevailing atmospheric conditions (snow, rain, fog, etc.).

While most non-recurrent incidents have the same negative impact on roadway performance, not all incidents are purely random nor are they equally difficult to plan for. While most crashes are unpredictable by their very nature, accident–prone segments of the roadway can be identified via statistical analysis and specific geometric or other safety treatments applied.

Likewise, roadworks can be managed in such a way as to minimise their impacts on traffic (e.g. by undertaking major road works at night). Even weather, while impossible to change, can be better managed on the roads with active speed management and can be prepared-for with contingency planning that can lessen its impact on traffic.

The specific mechanisms relating to the triggering of congestion are different according to different classes of roadways. Congestion on uninterrupted flow facilities such as motorways does not occur in the same manner nor for the same proximate causes as congestion arising on interrupted flow facilities such as those found in dense urban cores.

One key relationship for policy-makers to keep in mind is the relationship between the release of existing capacity or the provision of new capacity - and the subsequent demand for use of that newly available capacity. This relationship is captured in the price-elasticity of travel and has an impact in how quickly newly available capacity is filled. In particular, there is broad evidence that newly available capacity does attract new travel on the road in question. This is not necessarily a bad thing since travellers are able to undertake trips that they otherwise could not on those routes or at those times. What matters however, from a policy perspective, is the likely ex-post demand for travel and not the existing level of demand. The impact of induced and/or diverted traffic should not be underestimated – not only for road-building projects but also for policies whose practical result is to free up capacity.

Congestion impacts

Congestion involves queuing, slower speeds and increased travel times, which impose costs on the economy and generate multiple impacts on urban regions and their inhabitants. Congestion also has a range of indirect impacts including the marginal environmental and resource impacts of congestion, impacts on quality of life, stress, safety as well as impacts on non-vehicular roadspace users such as the users of sidewalks and road frontage properties. Policy-makers should ensure that cost-benefit evaluations or other policy evaluation methodologies include an assessment of these impacts as well as take into account broader considerations such as the type of cities people want.

Conceptual frameworks used to assess congestion and its impacts

There is rarely a uniform conceptual framework for addressing congestion and appraising congestion management policies across the variety and scope of actors involved. Furthermore, there exists a real tension between different conceptual models underlying congestion cost and impact calculations which in turn can influence congestion management approaches. Economic models can lead to the formulation of quite different congestion management objectives from physical models.

Generally speaking, traditional approaches used by road administrations have focused on managing road systems in urban areas in ways that maximise their ability to handle current and expected future traffic demand. Such flow-based approaches seek to maximise the physical usage of available road capacity, taking into account other road management goals such as safety. Roads are rated at a set capacity as expressed in flow, density or, synthetically, as “levels of service”. Achieving higher flows, higher densities and higher levels of service in keeping with the rated capacity of the roadway has traditionally been seen as performance “improvement”. Likewise, street networks are operated with an eye to reaching maximum intersection clearing capacities during peak hours.

Such operational approaches are well adapted to identifying the locations where bottlenecks exist. They aim to minimise traffic delays and the associated personal, business and resource impacts including personal and productive time lost, fuel wasted and adverse air quality. They allow administrations to highlight locations where action may need to be taken to respond to the delays experienced by users on a regular basis. However, approaches that seek to maximise vehicle throughput along major links inevitably take traffic levels into unstable zones and heighten the risks of recurrent and unpredictable congestion.

Economic assessments of congestion and its impacts have led to alternative approaches that seek to define an “optimal” level of traffic for a given road, intersection, network, etc. These define the cost of congestion as those costs incurred when traffic levels are beyond the “optimum” level. In particular, they account for the costs imposed by each additional user of the road on other road users and on society as a whole. Optimal congestion approaches consider demand for road space as well as supply and seek an “optimal” balance between the two. Economically optimal levels of congestion take into consideration not only the cost of road provision but also what people are ready to pay in order to use the road. Economically “optimal” levels of traffic not only entail a certain degree of congestion – as the term is commonly understood by roadway managers and users – but this “optimal” level of traffic can also vary i.e. it is not related solely to the capacity of the infrastructure under consideration.

One benefit of using an economic framework for describing and analysing congestion is that these approaches allow policies to take into account the heterogeneity of road users and, in particular, the variability in users’ value of time. Well constructed economic approaches can also inform policy-makers when it makes sense to invest in certain forms of congestion relief measures – including the provision of new infrastructure.

There are differences between the outcomes that result from the conceptual frameworks traditionally used and optimal congestion approaches. There are also gaps between the theory and the practice in determining the “optimum” levels of traffic that policy-makers should be aware of when adopting conceptual models to describe congestion and prescribe policy actions. For instance, simplified economic approaches based on speed-flow relationships inadequately capture the manner in which the formation and discharge of queues impact roadway users. Likewise they are not necessarily well adapted to the description of congestion behaviour on dense street networks where intersection clearance times (and not link performance) are the key variables. There are other approaches, such as bottleneck-based models that better capture the spatial and temporal impacts of congestion in these circumstances.

Another gap exists between the design of many congestion management policies and road users’ concerns relating to the reliability and predictability of travel times and not just their average duration. Unreliable travel times impose real costs on individual road users and can have significant downstream impacts on productivity (e.g. as in the case of increased inventory holdings by businesses). These impacts and costs should not be neglected when formulating congestion policy responses.

Overall costs of congestion

Many congestion response strategies have been motivated by misguided, erroneous or misleading overall congestion cost estimates.

Congestion cost calculations have often incorporated unrealistic assumptions relating to baseline travel conditions. Often, such estimates have sought to determine a total “cost of congestion” by assigning a value to the difference between free-flow travel speeds and speeds actually realised on the transport network – a difference that has alternatively been labelled “lost” time or travel “delay”. However, in order to experience such time losses, there must have been a reference situation in which the same volume of travellers undertaking the same activities in the same city could have travelled without any delay at all, including in peak periods i.e. they must have had the additional time in the first place.

It is clear that most cities cannot afford nor would desire the types of transportation networks that would allow for free and unencumbered travel at all hours of the day. In other words, users have never had the time which these estimates assume they have “lost”. Roads in major metropolitan areas are never built to allow free-flow travel at all times of the day, including in particular peak periods.

Such “cost of congestion” approaches are also misleading when they neglect the fact that congestion is the outcome of crowding in urban areas – itself the successful result of other urban policies. Empty cities are not generally considered successful cities; nor should empty roads.

The impacts of congestion are not abstract – they must be linked t roadway users’ experiences and expectations. Instead of attempting to calculate the “overall cost” of congestion, from an analytical viewpoint, it may be more productive to estimate the relative changes in levels and costs of congestion. By comparing current levels with past (and expected future) levels, it is possible to assess the extent to which congestion is reducing the potential benefits - e.g. in overall accessibility to urban facilities and services. Where the costs are increasing a key question is whether the costs of mitigating congestion are likely to be less than the current cost to road users and the city at large of present levels of congestion? Robust benefit-cost assessments are necessary to ensure that the benefits of congestion management strategies exceed their costs.

While benefit-cost assessments are normally employed to assess major expenditures (e.g. new roads or other infrastructure), they are not always employed for lesser interventions that nevertheless can have a cumulative impact on congestion levels. These might include specific bottleneck or congestion hotspot treatments, investments in non-road interventions (accident clearing, parking policies, work-time rules) and generally situations where full cost benefit analysis is viewed as too burdensome for the scale of intervention at hand or where congestion impacts are not considered. In some cases, simplified flow-based assessments for small projects or interventions may be running concurrently with more complex and benefit-cost assessments for major investments and the outcomes of these processes might be working at cross-purposes. In the case of simplified assessment methodologies, care should be taken to explicitly state what has been covered in the assessment and what has been omitted.[4]

Before we involved ourselves into detail on this matter, it is better for us to develop a reason why this congestion happens. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) have classified seven main causes of traffic congestion which are physical bottlenecks/ capacity, traffic incidents, work zones, weather, traffic control devices, special events and fluctuation in normal traffic.[5]

Precisely, we are trying to attempt the reason why this situation comes into existence with the following causes:-

·         Government policies.

·         Overloaded of vehicles in roads.

·         Advancement in technology.

·         Income level is increasing.

·         People start to practice high level of living conditions.

·         Transportation system still in the state of development.

·         Illegal business which used the side of the road.

·         Accidents

·         Events.

·         Road merges

·         People behavior

·         Malfunction of traffic light

·         Road damaged

·         Weather

·         Riot

·         Election

·         Road block

·         Double parking

First of all, the policy implemented by the government which give the freedom to the consumers to have as many vehicles as they can buy. As we know, government adapted this policy because they want to increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is the indicator which measures economic health of a country. The increment of GDP is affected by increase in consumption, investment and foreign direct investment. In other word, the increase in investment is the increase in the capital consumption. In this context, I assume that the increase in the capital consumption means that, producers are starting to buy a machine to produce a product, which is a car. This means that the demand of the private vehicles is really high. This kind of policy seems to be the effective one because Malaysia is trying to compete with the developed country such as Britain, United States and the other western continents. It seems that government is more willing to pay a high cost of maintenance than imposed a better policy which can help generate income to country as well as preserving the nature.

Previously, between 1985 and 1997, the modal share of public transport decreased from 34.3 percent to 19.7 percent. This represents a major shift away from public transport and in particular bus transport, which is partly attributable to higher personal affluence leading to an increase in car ownership and also to deficiencies in the bus services. The increasing reliance on private transportation, in particular private cars, has created considerable pressure on the road network which has contributed to the problems of traffic congestion.[6]

            Secondly, congestion can occur when there is an increase/overloaded of vehicles in the road and the increase in income level. Based on the Road Transport Department report, the ratio of registered cars and motorcycles in Kuala Lumpur was 985.7 per 1,000 population in 2000. However, based on the Home Interview Survey carried out by JICA in 1998 the estimated possession ratio in vehicles represents approximately 211 cars per 1,000 population and 164 motorcycles per 1,000 population. Private cars account for 56.6 percent of all motorised trips in Kuala Lumpur.

 Nowadays, the road is not looks like a road anymore because it always full with the vehicles until we barely see the lines and the tart. People are driving their own car to commute from one place to another place as example to commute from home to workplace. The high travel demand has been met in large part by private transportation in particular, private cars. As a consequence, there has been congestion and a serious deterioration of travel speed on major roads in many parts of Kuala Lumpur, especially in the City Centre as well as in the east and south, due to major traffic routes operating at or above capacity during peak hours. Low vehicle occupancy has further aggravated the problem[7].

Moreover, we are in the modern era which I considered people are being selfish and full of arrogance. They put their ego/pride and the concept of materialism as a yardstick of their life indication whether success or not. This kind of concepts of thought lead people to be selfish, do not tolerate with other, and neglect the ethical manners in their daily life.

Furthermore, people today are practicing the high standard of living conditions which they always bears in mind that having a car is a compulsory for them. They start to buying a car as a way to show off or trying to protect themselves from being criticized by those who are owned private vehicles. As well as the income of the household increases, the demand for normal good which is vehicles also increases. This is the behavior of the human being.

Normal goods in economic term is defined as the goods which increasing the level of satisfaction each time they consume it and it only can be consumed when the income level is increasing, contrary to inferior goods which have the negative relationship with income level. Briefly, inferior goods are the goods which have low quality as example the goods sold in bundle shop and burgers. People consumed more inferior goods because they are shortage of money to conclude a transaction. In this case, we will use vehicles as the example for the normal goods. Let focused back to the income level which helps indirectly in the overloading vehicles on the road. Let put ourselves as the example as the way to describe this situation rather than trying to put the blame on others.

Frankly, we do admit that we as a consumer will try to increase our consumption in normal goods whenever our income rises. We would buy a new car in the market because these possible reason which are-

-We have the ability to purchase it,

-We want to pleased myself and my family,

-We are replacing my old car with the new one,

-We are trying to make people jealous with us and many other reasons.

So, as the result, without we noticing, we are creating a competition on vehicle market which we can derived the reason is from the jealousy of friends, relatives and other people surround me. This later will shift the demand side to the right, meaning, there is an increase in demand of vehicles and firms will try to supply it. In the firms’ perspective, the increase in demand is showing they will generate more income which is parallel with firms’ objective-maximizing profit. Thus, there will be a lot of a car in the road because of the greediness of the human being.

            Additionally, the technology is changing everyday in our life as the new inventions keeping introduced by inventors/companies. We will attempt to relate the former causes with this cause which we found some relation in these two factors. The former factor, we discussed about why there is an overloaded of vehicles on the road which affected by the living standard and income level. Here is some information; one of the determinants that can shift the demand curve is the advancement in technology.

 As technology keeps evolving day by day, we can expect that there will be an invention of new machines which can produce a product with lower cost and there will also be new creative ideas come into existence. As example, the emergence of hybrid model from the car’s producers and the creative design of a car attract consumers’ attention. As we know, technology makes communication become easier, thus advertisements easily advertise to the consumer through internet, televisions and others. This is quite a good example to show how technology shifts the demand curve.

            Moreover, the transportation system in Malaysia is still under the state of development which we can say it still in infant state. There is a degree of overlap and duplication in the functions of the various agencies responsible for Kuala Lumpur’s transportation network which has led, in some instances, to conflicting policies or programmes. This has made it more difficult to formulate policies for public and private transportation which are consistent. This factor somehow leads to the congestion around the Malaysia. There is a wise word which says “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” has a good point of expressing the crucial idea about management/planning in doing something.

As we can see today, transportation system in Malaysia still under development due to unskilled workers or there could be a shortage of worker who are specialized in this area. In addition, people who are trying to build a building in urban areas as well as rural areas are failed to look thoroughly about their actions of doing so. In certain situation, the public transportation does not solve the congestion problem, but they have worsen the congestion because in Malaysia, only certain area have lane that allocated for buses and taxis.

 Furthermore, heavy vehicles are freely using the road which makes the road become congested. As well, bus station or bus stop placed around Malaysia is not really systematic. For example, the existing main bus terminal is at Puduraya in the City Centre. The majority of intercity buses and coaches terminate there, thus adding to traffic congestion and consequently, longer journey times for passengers.

            Next is, congestion exists due to accident which taking place on the road. Frequently we experienced a long queue on the road where there is an accident occurred because of the curiosity attitude which possessed by Malaysian community. For example, when there is an accident, the road’s users are driving slowly and try to see what has happened. They rather see than helping the victims. Sometimes they spent a lot of time watching at the scene one after another.

Apart from that, accident will take some space of an available road which sometimes it took half of the road if the heavy vehicles and buses are involved in that accident. There will be a long queue for hours which make the congestion become worsen due to late response/arrive from police and ambulance because stuck in congestion while heading to place where accident taking place.

Apart from accident, traffic can be congested if there is an event taking place in certain area. As we are aware, Malaysia consists of many races which celebrating various festivals such as Hari Raya, Thaipusam, Chinese New Year and so forth. When the festival is taking place in certain areas, the traffic need to recourse to another alternative which lead to the traffic congestion. Furthermore, when there is an occasion such as wedding ceremony or open house, we will notice that many vehicles are parked unsystematically which later will create a trouble for other users.

 Malaysian citizens mostly do not care about other and sometimes they follow what others are doing. Imagine the situation where there is a driver who parked his car in the side of the road and neglecting the line as well as the sign written no parking. After several minutes, a new driver is trying to find a place to park his car and he see the previous car and he just parked behind that car. Is not it creating a problem for those who want to use the road because the road has become narrowed.

Then, Malaysia is a unique country where there are many places/situation which are not available in other country and one of it is Pasar Malam. This uniqueness of Malaysia somewhat be part of the cause of traffic congestion in our country. At certain place, we will see stalls are setting up on the road when night is around the corner. For those who are not familiar with these scenes may think that these people are out of their mind, but for those who are familiar with that situation cannot wait for the night to come.

As usual, when there is a Pasar Malam, people just park their vehicle at the side of the road and sometimes, the way they parked the vehicle is like a child who does not know to arrange thing. All the drivers are assumed to be matured enough to distinguish between good and bad, but they just same as the child or even worst. This is an example for the rural area. For the urban area, the case is different. In urban area, Pasar Malam is considered as low standard, while the night stall so called “uptown” has become the queen of their heart. Urban residents are more concentrate on spending their night at the uptown with their friends.

 Moreover, urban residents can be categorized as high income people, which in other meaning, most of them possess their own vehicle and particularly a car. Can you imagine that everyone brings their own car even there are alone? If ten people are behaving like that, there will be ten cars on the road. Why do not they share the car? Are they rich enough? Do they ever think about fuel price, parking lot, and congestion? These are some questions that always flying in our mind.

 Afterward, illegal businesses also indirectly affect the road user and leads to congestion. Illegal businesses typically taking place at the side of the road as we seen in the Puduraya, or area around Central City. These businesses make the vehicles move slowly because they want to avoid themselves from hitting people who are at the side of the road. During that time, many road users are not obeying a rule. Here is a situation which regularly happens in the rural area. Even though the demand for the road usage at rural area is not as high as the urban area, but, because this illegal businesses, road is congested. Drivers park their vehicle according to themselves, teenagers driving recklessly and trying to get attention by organizing illegal racing. They also flirt the girls who are walking at the side of the road.

Same goes at the urban area, however in the urban area, situation seems more troublesome. We always see in the urban area many shops so called “kedai mamak” or “kedai makan” has show a significant growth in numbers due to increase in demand by consumers. Our community loved to hang out with their friend until the late of night and sometimes they come back home around 5 or 6 a.m. in the morning. As consequences for this situation, many food entrepreneurs have to expand their business, but there is a space constraint. So, they take an easy solution by placing tables and chairs on the road even though they realized that their decision is unethical, however, because of the profit maximization principle encourage them to do so. Later on, this situation has become a trend among the food entrepreneur to get more profit. 

            In addition, traffic congestion normally happens when merging points are met. A merging point is a situation where several lanes start to converge into fewer lanes. A merge is produced if there are n number of lanes turning into m number of lanes where n and m are integer values and m must be smaller than n and n must be at least 1.

 Merges are not the opposite of diverge because a diverge means splitting and normally maintaining the number of lanes. When it comes to merges, drivers will try to switch to the lane where vehicles are moving fast on the lane or when a shorter traffic queue is observed. Therefore, merges normally carry a high risk of accidents if there is no consideration given or proper regulations are not complied. In an observation on traffic activity, it is found that congestion on highways is often caused by merges. A long stretch of vehicles cannot merge if there are no gaps which are big enough for a vehicle to fit in. If drivers are able to create large spaces between each vehicle throughout the way, lane changing by vehicles can happen easily.

When this occurs, vehicles need to compete with other vehicles to keep to their respective lanes in order to reach a destination. Therefore, some vehicles need to reduce in speed to give way for other vehicles to make lane-changing which resulted in long traffic queues on the road. As example the merge after the toll plaza at Penang Bridge is taken as a scenario for our study. Penang Bridge is a bridge which connects the island of Penang and the mainland of Peninsular Malaysia. This area often encounters traffic congestion especially during peak hours.[8]

            Although, there are many reasons have been presented, here is another reason why congestion occurs. Traffic lights in Malaysia sometimes do not work as it should be to ease the traffic movement. We always encounter with the malfunction of traffic light and indirectly force us to make a straight line for about kilometers waiting to move forward. When there is any malfunction of traffic light, we sometimes in the dilemma whether we should move or let others move.

 In certain situation, we have to wait for a long period because the vehicles are continuously moving forward and we are not able to move. This situation has its negative impact on us as well as other people, our heart started to fill with anger, impatient, stressed and depressed. These negative emotions will lead us to do some silly, selfish movement which can bring danger to other. We may cause an accident to happen or a quarrel. If the policeman is arriving late, we can imagine there will be a total chaos with the sound of honk, unsatisfied face, start to blaming other and lastly encourages people to do something stupid because driven by their negative emotions.

            The road situation itself sometimes could be a factor for the congestion. How can it be? Here is the answer, assume that there is a hole on the road, the drivers mostly trying to avoid the hole because they love their car more than others indirectly constitute an accident. For a man, the car is his wife, his partner, his lover. Here is a simple situation, when someone trying to avoid a hole and without he noticing there is a car that trying to overtake him. If he suddenly changes his direction without given any indication the car that trying to overtake it will bump into his car. The result later will leads to the congestion.

            Other than that, natural weather also somehow causes congestion. When there is a heavy rain, storm and other natural related phenomenon will cause road to be congested. For example, when there is a heavy rain, some people will try to drive slowly because they cannot see the road. Moreover, in certain situation weather may cause the tree to fall down and thus make a vehicle hard to move.

            Currently, Malaysia community is positively involved themselves with a riot. They keep protesting about Internal Security Act (ISA), then about teaching Mathematic and Sciences in English. These situations can be considered as a part of congestion’s determinant. As we all concerned, when there is a riot, they will be a lot of people who are participating in it. Even there only organizing a peaceful demonstration, based on our view, most of demonstration will turn to a chaos. Thus, this situation will become more uncontrollable and force police to act and prevent it for be worse.

Sometimes, double parking also give some contribution for congestion. Malaysian mostly just park behind others vehicle. As example:- NO IMAGE

 This situation not only make the road congested, but it also make people angry with the driver because he block the traffic movement and so forth.

            Lastly, congestion might occurs if there is an election taking place. As election commence, people started to campaign and trying to attract people to vote for their party. Sometimes, they have created a chaos through their illegal gathering. When the illegal gathering is taking place, they will be a quarrel between supporter of every party. Let us look at the picture below where this situation has forced police to involved.

            In our opinion, we have a derived the major cause which initially contributed a large portion on traffic congestion. The major cause which can explain these situations underlies on human behavior itself. As we know, in Al-Quran, various ayat explain the behavior of human whose always break the promise, doing bad thing and so forth. As example:-

Man has been given the freedom of choice to do good or evil. This freewill gives him independence of intention, choice and action in various situations of moral conflict. Man is the only creature in this universe who has been given choice and discretion which accompany him through his life span. (The Qur’an, 15:36)

In this ayat, human has been endowed with are freedom to make a choice and the most important thing is human possesses the power of reasoning which differentiate them with other creature but only some of them utilize their brain according to Shariah. As Prophet said that every work begins with an intention and I found that many verses in Al-Quran which stated “In their hearts was a disease……” With my level of understanding right now, I would to say that every action that we made is basically derived from our heart whether we seeking for His pleasure or we just pleased ourselves.

Prepared by Mohd Hafizullah Bin Abu Bakar

Bachelor of Economics

International Islamic University Malaysia

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[1] www.internationaltransportforum.org/jtrc/CongestionSummary.pdf

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_congestion

[3] http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v45/v45-49.pdf

[4] www.internationaltransportforum.org/jtrc/CongestionSummary.pdf

[5] http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v45/v45-49.pdf

[6] http://www.dbkl.gov.my/pskl2020/english/transportation/index.htm

[7] http://www.dbkl.gov.my/pskl2020/english/transportation/index.htm

[8] http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v45/v45-49.pdf

I AM SO SORRY BECAUSE, THERE ARE A LOT OF IMAGES IN THIS THOUGHT, BUT, SINCE I LOST MY LAPTOP AND I CANT COPY THE IMAGE,....HOPE U CAN FIND SOMETHING USEFUL IN MY WRITING...THANKS..