Estimating Traffic Density: Trends and the Impact of BRT Construction on Traffic Junctions of Karachi using Geospatial Techniques

Everyone must commute on a daily basis to work, get educated, buy necessities, seek entertainment or visit friends and family. Thus, transport infrastructure has become an integral or probably the most important aspect of urban design. Major cities of the world have a mass transit system or even multimodal transport system to cater for the transportation needs of their citizens. Karachi a mega polis city of approximately 23 million residents lacks a properly coordinated and well scheduled transportation mechanism. Therefore, its residents primarily rely on their own means to fulfill their commuting needs resulting in heavy traffics and very significant time delays on its roads. These time delays and rush hour frustrations in turn have a negative impact on the overall productivity and psychological and social well-being of the populace. The government has in recent years taken up this matter seriously and begun construction of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems along various major traffic corridors of Karachi. The purpose of this thesis was to study the change of traffic behavior in recent years, traffic density variations and the impact on transportation road might have along its corridors using geospatial techniques. The results of this study showed that daily average passenger commutes experienced an increase of approximately 58.4% from 2012 to 2017 and that major mode of transportation shifted from public transit vehicles to private ones specially motorcycles resulting in unfavorable occupancy to Passenger Car Unit (PCU) ratio. This in turn has adversely affected the traffic density of the city. This congestion can only see some relief when the BRT becomes operational.