Pedestrians, signal and foot over-bridge at Shahbag

The Dhaka City Corporation is planning to build a foot over-bridge at Shahbag in order to ensure safety of pedestrians. However, experience from other foot over-bridges in the city suggests that this may not be effective in ensuring safety of pedestrians crossing the street at this location as many pedestrians will still be jaywalking dangerously to cross the street. Foot over-bridges and underpasses are quite unpopular among pedestrians in the capital due to reasons such as laziness, consumption of time, physical problems, presence of hawkers, lack of security, dirtiness and poor condition.

Thus a foot over-bridge at this location may turn out to be a waste of money. A more effective way to ensure safety of pedestrians, while they cross the street, is to provide cross-walks or zebra-crossings with their signals with countdown timers and push buttons. This system is being applied at many pedestrian crossings around the world to enhance pedestrian safety, especially in the city centres and places with high pedestrian traffic. In a pedestrian signal, the green time is split between the pedestrians and vehicular traffic; pedestrians should only cross when it is green for pedestrians and vehicular traffic should only cross when it is green for vehicular traffic.

The effectiveness of this signal, especially the safety of pedestrians, depends entirely on the compliance rate of this signal both from pedestrians and from motorists. To maximise compliance rate, violators, both vehicles and pedestrians, have to be penalised. The city authority may try to apply this system in other parts of the city too with high pedestrian traffic. In addition to the above measure, to ensure pedestrians' safety, areas with high pedestrian traffic can be declared as 'Reduced Speed Zone'.

Ridwan Quaium

Transportation Engineer

in Thailand

ridwanq@gmail.com