Only two proper U-turns in Islamabad: ITP

Traffic police chief says roads cannot handle volume of traffic

ISLAMABAD: With traffic accidents becoming increasingly common and claiming over 67 lives since the start of the year, traffic police officials have claimed that bad design of u-turns in the capital is one of the major reasons for the accidents.

Officials said that that only two U-turns in the capital had been properly designed while keeping traffic rules in mind.

Traffic SSP Malik Matloob told The Express Tribune that Islamabad has a total of 381 U-turns.

“But only two of them are properU-turns which have been designed as per the road traffic engineering [specifications]. All of the rest are ‘blind’ U-turns,” Matloob said. He was talking about the two ‘fish belly U-turns’ which were recently built at the Zero Point and the Sector F-7 U-turn on Faisal Avenue.

Matloob said the two U-turns had been designed by the ITP and constructed by the Capital Development Authority (CDA).



He added that the collaboration between the police and CDA came about after 79 fatal road accidents were reported last year. While this was down from the 123 reported in 2015, this year so far as many as 67 fatalities have been reported from across the capital with as many as 53 injured.

The ITP official added that despite having limited resources, the department was doing its best to regulate traffic in the capital even though road infrastructure development in the capital had not kept pace with the growing volume of traffic in the capital.

“The road furniture we have today is more or less the same we had in 1992. No new road has 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. But today, 575,000 vehicles enter the capital every day,” he said.

He added that the most traffic accidents were reported on the Islamabad Expressway and the IJP Road which connect Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Jammu and Kashmir to Islamabad.

The SSP said that the Islamabad Expressway was an expressway in name only since it did not have any service road even though entrances of a number of housing societies directly branched off 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.

SSP Matloob added that construction was continuing along several points on the Expressway and that the work is expected to continue at least for another year and a half. Which means traffic would remain disturbed on the road.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 19^th, 2017.