Letter to the Editor

Emergency Lanes Users to blame for Bottlenecks

Dear Sir,

As a motorist who has to travel the whole length of the north south highway from Johor Bahru to my home-town in Perlis, the hari raya exodus is one of the most dreaded moment of my life. The prospect of spending hours at crawling pace is a nightmare.

On many occasions during my previous journeys on the highway, I found that most traffic jams were created by undisciplined drivers who immediately took to the emergency lanes at the slightest sign of slowing down of traffic. They sparked bottlenecks which subsequently cause the traffic jam.

Slight slowing down of the traffic is normal, and it will ease itself easily soon but once a trail of cars have started to take to the emergency lanes, the problem starts. Bottlenecks will easily form once the cars in the emergency lanes have to rejoin the main lanes when they meet obstacles such as a stalled car or emergency vehicles on the emergency lane.

Permit me to give a scientific explanation to a common sense observation that emergency lane users causes bottlenecks and consequently traffic jams. The flow of traffic can basically be described by an operational research tool called ‘queuing theory’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory). Three lanes merging into one create a bottleneck because like in a post-office queue, the rate of service (i.e. the original number of car per minute along the lane) remains the same, but the customer arrival rate (number of cars per minute entering the main lane) has increased. This results in the overall slowdown of service (total number of cars per minute passing the lane), hence a traffic jam.

It is thus very important therefore for drivers to have strong self-disciplines, controlling the urge to use the emergency lanes.

On the other hand, it very tempting to use the lanes when we see the culprits use them with impunity.

Therefore it is also very important for the authorities to strictly enforce the rule for this kind of anti-social behaviour. I suggest that during Ops Sikap XX, the enforcement authorities monitor the emergency lane users and slap a heavier-than-normal fines for the culprits.