Loss of manpower due to road traffic congestion in Kandy city: a comparison between different vehicle users

Abstract

Introduction :

Traffic congestion is widely seen as a growing problem in many urban centers in Sri Lanka. The total vehicle population in the country has dramatically increased with an average annual growth rate of 6 % between 2008 and 2016 (Karunarathna, 2019). According to vehicle registration records of the Department of Motor Traffic, in peak hours, more than 3 million automobiles use road infrastructure all over the country. At present, while the total number of households in the country is 5.1 million, total number of vehicles in use is 6.4 million showing that the number of vehicle population is higher than the number of families (households) in the country. Of these, 50 % of automobiles are inbound to Colombo and Kandy while most of them are personally owned automobiles (Karunarathna, 2019). This growing trend in the vehicle population has important implications for Sri Lankan society, economy and the environment while creating severe traffic congestion in major cities.

The overall volume of vehicular traffic congestion continues to grow faster than the capacity of the urban road transportation system in the last decade. Road traffic congestion directly reduces productivity levels and adds additional costs to the total production cost in term of a loss of resources. It creates a huge loss of manpower as most commuters have to spend their productive time or leisure time on roads travelling. A few recent studies (Maparu and Pandit, 2010; Xu et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2014) show that traffic congestion leads to increase in the operating cost of vehicles, delay of the journey, increase in pollution and in stress. The results of these studies indicate a considerable monetary loss that is incurring due to traffic congestion. However, most of these studies have tended to concentrate on a particular aspect of congestion such as environment cost, emission etc. rather than analyzing the value of the loss of manpower which can be the most important component of the total cost of traffic congestion. Accordingly, this study will partly attempt to fill this void in the literature by using travel time survey data in Kandy City in Sri Lanka.