Abstract
The bustling urban environment of Kathmandu Valley is characterized by unprecedented traffic congestion. Due to its bowel-shaped geography, gusty winds rarely remove vehicular emissions from the urban atmosphere, making Kathmandu one of Asia’s most polluted cities, 100th city in global pollution index. Over 500,000 vehicles travel daily on over 1600 km of roads covering over 675 sq·km urban area. Thousands of low occupancy vehicles are added each year to the urban public transit system (UPTS). Kathmandu faces worse and unreliable traffic from the current UPTS mostly with low occupancy vehicles. Around 4.5 million urban denizens, both permanent and transient residents, suffer from unreliable UPTS. Traffic rules and daily transportation schedules are rarely followed, resulting in frequent traffic jams and accidents. Once experienced, visitors try avoiding the UPTS. Tourism, annually contributing almost 8 percent to Nepal’s total annual GDP, also suffers from poor UPTS. Planners, policy makers, and politicians (P-actors) are seeking ways to improve sustainable UPTS to ameliorate stresses to family life and working hours for the urban majority. Aiming to help P-actors, we propose a transit-tracker model that uses real time information (RTI) in mobile phones and web-embedded devices to inform travelers, drivers, government authorities, and sub-admins. We argue that unreliability in the UPTS motivates urban elites to add more low occupancy vehicles, which in turn reduces already shrunken urban spaces and contributes more per capita air pollution than multi-occupancy vehicles. Since mobile and smart phones are capable of processing RTI to generate meaningful information and inform various stakeholders in communicable languages, we argue that replacing low occupancy vehicles with multi-occupancy buses within a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, on main roads with fixed schedules and strict traffic rules, would not only improve UPTS, but also reduce pollution in the Kathmandu Valley.
Highlights
Planners, policy makers, and politicians (P-actors) have been struggling to efficiently manage the urban public transit system (UPTS) in a rapidly urbanizing environment
We argue that unreliability in the UPTS motivates urban elites to add more low occupancy vehicles, which in turn reduces already shrunken urban spaces and contributes more per capita air pollution than multi-occupancy vehicles
Apr. 29, 2019 stakeholders in communicable languages, we argue that replacing low occupancy vehicles with multi-occupancy buses within a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, on main roads with fixed schedules and strict traffic rules, would improve UPTS, and reduce pollution in the Kathmandu Valley
Summary
Policy makers, and politicians (P-actors) have been struggling to efficiently manage the urban public transit system (UPTS) in a rapidly urbanizing environment. There are many challenges to sustain the quality of life in urban environments (QoLUE), where almost each day new complex structures are added to the already crowded urban spaces. Complex infrastructures and increasing population in urban areas have necessitated different modes of transit. Transportation plays a vital role in any urban space, and it offers an opportunity to P-actors to demonstrate their performances in a concentrated area within a short time period. Maintaining quality transportation with the least amount of road congestion has been an ongoing problem because of the addition of infrastructure and different types of vehicles each day to meet the needs of a growing population. Urban denizens face imbalances between their work and domestic life, especially, because the transportation becomes unreliable and expensive [1], and adds an excessive amount of pollutants from older vehicles using leaded petroleum products
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