Reducing traffic congestion in Medan

Impatient of citizens of Medan becomes the key factor of traffic congestion too

As one of the biggest city in Indonesia, Medan still tries to improve the facilities and infrastructure to support the economic activities. One of those is the improvement of road to reduce the traffic which always happened particularly in the weekdays. However, the restoration of the roads is only used to avoid damaged on the road so it can affect the transportation system. Do the traffic congestion can be reduced by improving the road?

Similar to many cities in developing countries, the condition of big cities is the traffic congestion occurring in the rush hours. Normally, these hours are started in the morning after dawn and in the afternoon around 4 to 7 pm. If these are not organized well, the traffic congestion could be happening for the next four or five hours. This phenomenon must be solved quickly and thoroughly, but we must elaborate the issue firstly.

Traffic congestion in big city, for instance capital cities, is occurred because of the overcrowding in certain times. Due to the demands of life, many people working in big cities are originated from suburb areas. When the workhours are started, massif people move collectively from different areas to central region creating stacking which leads to traffic congestion. The overcrowding is the cause of traffic congestion because the many people use vehicles to go from house to the workplaces. Therefore, to reduce the traffic congestion, it is simply just to reduce the amount of vehicles. But, how can we do that? There are three things which can be elaborated to address this issue.

The first thing that the government can do is by providing the Mass Rapid Transportation (MRT) system. This MRT system could have transported many people from their houses to the workplaces. In Medan, this capital city is surrounded by many suburb areas such as Binjai, Tembung, Marelan, and Simalingkar areas which are respectively from North, South, East, and West. However, one of the MRT which is train is not operated except from Binjai creating congestion in the direction of Medan-Binjai. On the other hand, the others suburb areas generate heavy congestion as the society use cars and motorcycles to work.

Another thing is about the time of activities. The traffic congestion happens when people move from suburb areas to the central area which implies to the temporal over-population. To reduce the temporal over-crowding, the government must distribute the location of workplaces into several areas. Interestingly, schools and universities which are distributed in several areas in Medan cause the traffic congestion too as the students either are transported by their parents with vehicles or using private vehicles. The solution of this is by providing schools based transportation system organized by the government is promising while alternating the time schedule looks promising too.

However, the last thing we should have been aware is the increasing numbers of vehicles. These numbers were influenced by the ease of purchasing the vehicles throughout the monthly-credit system provided by insurance companies. An illustration of this is in one family which consists five people has five different vehicles because there is no expected transportation system.

Overall, the willingness of using transportation system in Medan is very low because the facilities and infrastructure cannot be expected in term of safety and comfortable. Therefore, in order to reduce the traffic congestion, creating Mass Rapid Transportation (MRT) is considered as best solution while promising options such as redeployment of workplaces and changing of working and school time can be implemented.

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