How It Tackled to Other Countries

It is proven that most of drivers in the world had ever been stuck in traffic jams especially in the most prone cities. This problem has caused a big trouble for those who wants to travel while their private cars is the only way to go by.

The charts below are showing how drivers rated traffic in world cities from the lowest into the highest percentage. It is shown that Beijing and Mexico City are the highest while Stockholm is the lowest one. Most of them had been stucked in roadway traffic while the rest are reported that they did not plan a driving trip to avoid the traffic congestion.

Some countries such Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Canada, India, New Zealand, Turkey, United States and United Kingdom also has a problem related to traffic congestion. They had their own solutions for tackling this problem.

Impacts of Traffic Jams

Large city or any areas which have a lot of road commuters may often experience traffic congestion

In facing the problem, traffic jam may cause some negative and also positive impacts to them. This may refer to something that is affected to life, even in education, career and the future.

Delays could be the first thing comes out from people’s mind when traffic jam happens. Many people out there who take vehicles especially private cars come late to school or work because of it. It also frustrates people in the afternoon rush hour when they drive home after work. The delays itself is mostly affected to their feeling who trapped in a traffic congestion after a tiring day in school or work.

Furthermore, it is necessary to estimate travel times while traffic congestion tangled it. People start to have no ideas of how much time they have to prepare before travelling, and it becomes too early when the unpredictable roadway is free from traffic jam. Most of drivers think that just in case the traffic is bad, so that they have to come early. Traffic congestion are also known by people with some particular places depends on the time of a day, but sometimes it also goes wrong.

Traffic jam itself also affected to health that caused by the burns of fuel when a higher rate of travel comes on the highway. This also increase fuel consumptions costs and even create air pollution which are related to global warming.

The increasing of vehicular traffic in urban areas cause the traffic jams which is also leading to loss of productive labour time and economic losses. Due the situation of average travel speed in the center of Bangkok during peak hours, 400 to 600 vehicles are added to the streets everyday. The following chart which is taken from WRI report showing the economic losses caused by traffic congestions in some of South-East Asian cities.

As can be seen in the picture above , Singapore is a city of the most economic losses in South-East Asia at that time. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok has lost about $300 million because of traffic jams while Seoul only lost about $150 million. The last three cities where traffic jams also happens the most, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Manila also caused a losses over $50 million. The traffic congestion proved that it has made so much bad impacts in economical of each countries especially the cities mentioned above.

Emergency vehicles such as an ambulance or a fire truck mostly called by people who are in an urgent condition that needs a help from them. Sometimes they are unable to respond in an appropriate time due to the traffic congestion which can cause a danger to them and their property. Although some systems allow the emergency crews to change the traffic lights into keep them moving, but the traffic jams also caused them to be in a late arrival.

Sources: 

http://anedjamikatedredneck.blogspot.sg/2012_12_01_archive.html

http://www.gdrc.org/uem/stat-ecoloss.html

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/percentage-of-air-pollution-due-to-cars.htm

Case Study

In the progress of making the report, we need to do our own case study and later combine case study and the other member's case studies into the report. In this case study, I did the "Traffic Management in UK". Anyway, I still got some problem while doing it, hmmm. 

2.1: Case Study 1: Traffic Management in UK

Traffic jam is the most common problem that happens in some countries that may affect to the populace. By doing this case study, the problem is expected to be managed based on how the government did in UK. Traffic problem in Cambridge, UK shows that the traffic jam in the oldest part of the cities caused by the narrow roads. Another thing that also caused the traffic jam is that over the past 40 years, the government had been decreasing the use of railway while the population in the city is increasing year by year.

Moreover, people who are coming to the city to work also increasing the population which affected to the traffic. Other than that, the increasing of population also come from travellers and tourism. Cambridge is also a city which got a lot of shopping centre and entertainment, that is why a lot of traveller are going there to find a reassurance.

Seeing through some points of view, heavy traffic congestion may caused to disadvantages and even worst. Particularly traffic congestion in rush hours can cause people and delivers are late and lost work for office workers. And also, traffic jam will cause a high pollution that affected to health.

According to the problem that had been described, there are some solutions which have done in Cambridge. For now, they have been doing the multi-storey car parks, cycle lanes and bus lanes, one way streets and pedestrianised areas. And in the future, they have a plan to do the road piercing and encouraging car sharing.

Building pedestrian areas could be effective enough to prevent traffic jam, people who passes through those areas should be walking instead of using any vehicles.

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Fig 2.1 Pedestrian Areas

For some of those ways to manage the traffic congestion, it could be the best way to solve the problem. For instance building pedestrians areas could be effective enough so people will be walking around to travel to that place instead of taking cars. And the other ways that had been done in Cambridge are also a good ways to avoid the traffic congestion.

Bibliography

Here it is our homework to do the bibliography for our report. Actually I found some difficulties of how to find all of the information for the bibliography. Anyway, we tried our best to do them. There are some books, electronic sources, magazine and newspaper.

Books

Resnick, Mitchel. ‘Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams’.Massachusetts: MIT Press,1994.

Vanderbitt, Tom. ‘Traffic: why we drive the way we do’. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Electronic Sources

‘The Effects of Traffic Congestion’. USA TODAY. Accessed 3 Mar. 2014.

<http://traveltips.usatoday.com/effects-traffic-congestion-61043.html>

‘Traffic Congestion’. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Last revised 17 Jan. 2014. Accessed 18 Jan. 2014.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_congestion>

Magazine

Gorzelany, Jim. ‘The Worst Traffic Jams In History’. Forbes. 21. March

James, Tony. ‘How to… cut traffic jams’. Engineering and Technology Magazine. Vol. 8, No. 1/January. 2013.

Newspaper

Zhang Hang.’北京机动车限行政策明年“更新”征交通拥堵费’.Beijing News.2 Sep.2013


Lastly, we need to add our blog in our bibliography:

Blog

Zhang Jie Ni

http://f133d0557.blogspot.sg/

Margareta Aniela

http://marf133d0348.blogspot.sg

Melissa Lim

http://f133d0055designprocess.blogspot.sg

Proposal

This week, we were asked to make a proposal based on the problem "Traffic Jams".

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 queueing. 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, this results in some congestion.

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 or traffic snarl-up. Traffic congestion can lead to drivers becoming frustrated and engaging in road rage.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_congestion

Proposal

Topic                         : Traffic Jam

Group name             : Awesome9

Group members      : Melissa Lim (Leader)

  Margareta Aniela (Scribe)

                                       Zhang Jieni

Introduction             :

The increasing number of cars nowadays has caused the main problem on the road that is the traffic jam. People are now very common with this term in daily activity because it is such kind of something that they face almost everyday. Actually this problem is not only affected to some students who are taking bus to school or campus, but also the businesses and commercial road users. The traffic jam sometimes may give bad impacts to the mental of people such a frustration and depression while they are on the way. Another causes such the delayed, late meeting and delivery may also affect to the road users. Even the expansion is no longer enough for major city that has a major population. There are much kind of things that can be done such as having a large parking lots on the outskirts and have frequent mass transit to the business road.

In this context there are some stakeholders who are affected to traffic congestion:

Students and teachers;

Employers;

Deliveryman;

Other commercial road users.

Here are some of the frame questions based on the problem:

Why do the students not wake up earlier?

Why are the students taking bus to school / campus instead of walking?

Why do the location of the students’ house so far from school/campus?

Sources                     :

Magazine

James, Tony. ‘How to… cut traffic jams’. Engineering and Technology Magazine. Vol. 8, No. 1/January. 2013.

<http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2013/01/how-to-traffic-jams.cfm>

Books

Vanderbitt, Tom. Traffic: why we drive the way we do. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Website

‘Traffic Congestion’. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Last revised 17 Jan. 2014.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_congestion>

We finally finished our proposal and collect it to the teacher. Before, we did a research on how traffic jams happen generally. Some sources also needed from magazine, books and websites, and we need to make it based on NAFA e-style guide on blackboard. We also did framed questions based on the problem 'Traffic jams". After doing this proposal, we know about how to write the right bibliography based on NAFA e-style guide and to write an objectives, framed questions to simply know the general things of the problem.

Empathy and Sympathy

In this second week of class, we were asked to do some tasks which is to search some stakeholders based on the problem. Stakeholders is people who are affected or related to the problem given. In this exercise, me and Jieni were doing the stakeholder which is a student and Melissa were doing the deliveryman.

Persona


Name: Ev

Occupation: Student

Age: 18

Address: 98 Jurong East

Daily life:

I am an 18 years old female student studying at NAFA. This is my second year and I stayed at an apartment at Jurong East with my family. I took a bus to the campus everyday. I often trapped in a traffic jams while on the way to school. And also, waiting for the bus to come is such a long time for me, sometimes it took for about half an hour to one hour. It is a big trouble for me if I come late to the class because it is disturbing my school time and makes me lost some of the lessons. I even try to wake up earlier to avoid the traffic congestions but it is a bit hard for me to do it everyday.

Here is it some research about students getting trapped because of traffic jam which is happens because snow and ice covered the roadway.

".....Traffic gridlock traps motorists

In the Atlanta suburbs, school buses were stuck in traffic for hours. Hundreds of students were stranded at schools waiting for their parents to pick them up.

Commutes that normally take minutes became nightmarish treks that lasted for hours.

CNN affiliate WSB captured dramatic footage of parents reuniting with children after being stuck on a school bus for hours......"

Source: http://wgntv.com/2014/01/29/children-trapped-in-schools-and-on-buses-in-rare-atlanta-snow-storm

Empathising is such an important thing to do to know how if we were put in someone's shoes. Me, as a student also have ever experienced trapped in a traffic jam while going to school. I felt that it is a bit useless to come to school while getting too late. To get an empathy feeling, we have to try and feel it by ourself on how getting late is not a great thing.

Mindmapping

After doing some researches, we were doing our mind map in the day we met at school library. We thought that using some colours in mind mapping could be better that is why we did so.

Here is the      Photo of our mind mapping. It explains about who are affected in traffic jams, how to prevent, what are the impacts, and why is it happens. There are some informations about traffic jams that we didn't know before. It is very important to do this exercise, to divide the main theme into some sub points and know some new things from the research.