POSSIBLE LOCATIONS AND POTENTIAL INTERSECTIONS IN NEED OF TRAFFIC LIGHT WITHIN UNIVERSITY OF BENIN, UGBOWO CAMPUS

ABSTRACT

The ability to move about freely in neighborhood, city and between cities has been taken for granted for years. Transportation mobility affects the ability to do jobs, quality of life and the economic productivity of the country. In today’s environment, mobility is also important to safety and security. Increasingly, however, mobility is jeopardized by congestion. The rate of traffic jams within the University of Benin, Ugbowo campus have continued to increase due to so many factors. Many staff and students now have and drive cars to the campus while the increase in the number of visitors for one reason or the other has been on the increases. The need to control the menace of jams using traffic lights is long overdue. This problem is becoming obvious as traffic now built up at peak hours and traffic warders are being significantly overwhelmed with vehicles controlling work (both on working days and sometimes at weekends). In view of this, this project proposed 12 locations including T-junction and cross-roads within the campus where these traffic light will serve effectively in controlling traffic and vehicular movement.  The traffic count study and analysis at one of the eventful week on campus shows that the accuracy percentage of vehicle class counted during peak traffic was car (99.51%) and the least was bike (91.43%) for the morning session. Similarly, the accuracy percentage of vehicle class count during evening peak traffic hours showed that car has the highest (98.83%) and bike has the least (82.86%). It is therefore recommended based on the findings of this work that the university authority embark on the installation of traffic lights at identified locations as soon as possible as doing this will bring relief to the traffic jam and congestion problems within the campus.