Only two proper U-turns in Islamabad: traffic police

ITP weighs in on traffic engineering standards in federal capital

ISLAMABAD: There are only two U-turns in the capital that are designed as per traffic rules, which is why there's a rise in road accidents in the federal capital, the Islamabad Traffic Police (ITP) have revealed.

Traffic SSP Malik Matloob told The Express Tribune on Tuesday that the capital city had 381 U-turns in all. "[However], there are only two U-turns, which are actually designed according to the road traffic engineering standards... the rest are all blind U-turns."

He was referring to the two ‘fish belly U-turns’ recently built at Zero Point and Sector F-7 U-turn on Faisal Avenue.

The Traffic SSP said that they were designed by the ITP and then put in place by the Capital Development Authority.

A total of 79 road accidents were reported in 2016, while 123 in 2015.



He said the ITP, despite its limited resources was doing its best to regulate traffic in the capital, however, the road infrastructure development was lagging behind with the growing burden on the city's roads.

“The road furniture we have today is more or less the same that we had in 1992 with no new roads having been built since the development of the Islamabad Expressway and the IJP Road in 2005."

"When these two roads were built [in 2005], the total influx of traffic into Islamabad was between 20,000-22,000 vehicles per day," he said.

In contrast, today 0.575 million vehicles enter the capital every day,” he added.

"Most of the traffic accidents were reported from the Islamabad Expressway and the IJP Road which connect Punjab, Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Jammu and Kashmir," Matloob added.

The SSP said that the Expressway was highway in only, since it had no service road and entrances to a number of housing societies were directly located on it.

“If there are 31 housing societies located on the Expressway from Faizabad to Rawat without a service road, then traffic police cannot be blamed [for traffic issues],” he said.

The Expressway, he added, was under-construction at many places and would remain so for the next 18 months.