DNA

ISLAMABAD: Road safety should not be confused with traffic management, says Prof Muhammad Zaman, head of Zaman Research Center (ZRC) at Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU).

He was speaking at a function to evaluate performance of his team, dedicated to HEC’s Grand Challenge Fund (GCF) project titled Optimal Use of Available Resources: A Prototype Model of Road Safety in Islamabad.

He said that road safety is a concept that includes countering pollution, saving lives and offering solutions. He said Islamabad needs 300 busses to overcome its mass transit needs. “We have developed Apps after thorough research that can tell commuters which bus to take and how long they have to wait for it. We have monitored movement of people digitally on different routes and roads,” he said.

“On the basis of our work, we are able to offer the city managers solutions to traffic problems. We can tell them which new routes are to open. Our Apps are working and QAU students are benefiting from these,” he said.

He said that his team has developed smart parking mechanism for Islamabad. He said there is a need to pool buses in the federal capital so that available resources are used optimally. “If we make a pool of buses, we will cut down the number of vehicles on our roads in a big way. It will lead to saving resources that are needed to ply these buses. It will also cut down pollution levels,” he said.

“However, the existing lot of bureaucrats is alien to the concept of pooling and red tapes have been hampering these solutions from being presented to the masses for whom they are meant for. Out-of-the-box thinking is need of the hour as we have resources enough to solve our problems but we lack strategy,” he said.

Researchers from QAU, IIUI, NUST, LUMS, and Ibadat University etc. attended the event and presented their work. A decent dinner was arranged at the end.