Traffic Jam

Traffic jam is a major issue in most city centers. With the increasing of number of vehicles on the road, the traffic jam is becoming more prevalent.

In order to alleviate traffic jam, the infrastructure needs to be expanded. For example, in the case of the Penang Bridge, the expansion of the bridge is near completion. The additional traffic lane plus a motorcycle lane was added to both sides of the bridge. I am confident that with the bridge expansion and removal of certain bottleneck areas along the bridge, traffic jam will be problems of the past. The newly refurbish bridge can carry the intended number of traffic until several years to come. After the completion of the second link to Penang, the Penang Bridge even can be congestion free for more years to come.

However, some incident can still cause the bridge to encounter traffic jam. According to this report, traffic jam occurred due to burning vehicle on the bridge. Traffic jam can also occur due to some incidents such as traffic accident along the bridge. As the bridge is being expanded to be more than three lanes in one direction, even though there is an accident, traffic still can flow through the bridge as compared to before where traffic just cannot flow because all lanes are being blocked by the vehicles involved in the accidents.

In order to overcome this kind of traffic jam, proper traffic management along the bridge need to be improved. The incident detection management system should be more efficient to detect the incident and immediately remove the incident in order to reduce the intensity of traffic jam.