Malaysia and other developing counties are facing serious traffic congestion problems due to population growth and rapid growth of motorisation in their cities. Nowadays, infrastructure development cannot match the rapid growth in motorisation and as a result, serious congestion occurs at almost every intersection during peak hours mainly due to the inability of the signal system to provide optimum flows, either due to the lack of optimum band width for progressive flows or because of the imbalanced green time splits. Traffic congestion is a condition on transport networks that occurs as use increases, and is characterised by increased vehicular queuing, slower speeds and longer trip times. In Malaysia, delays and long queues are observed repeatedly during peak hours due to poor road network strategies( Albrka, 2014). According to Shariff( 2012), the explosive growth in the demand for transport vehicles has resulted in the total number of recorded motor vehicles in Malaysia reaching 15 million units. As a result, the increased number of vehicles causes traffic congestion, resulting in slower travel speed. Highway traffic rules and regulations are required to develop better traffic capacity by controlling the high volume of traffic flow and at the same time plan for a rise in traffic flow volumes in the future.
In various cities, chronic traffic jams happen regularly, and traffic congestion loses billions of Ringgit an hour. In order to reduce these losses, it is necessary to reduce the delay time and also to create an efficient method of resolving traffic congestion( Foad Shokri et al., 2009). According to Greenwood and Bennett( 1996), vehicle fuel consumption increases by approximately 30 % under heavy congestion conditions and dynamic vehicular delays at intersections is a major current concern, because the standard static network equilibrium formulation fails to capture essential features of traffic congestion.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Traffic congestion and long queues at the intersections and roundabouts occurring during rush hours are repeatedly observed at Bukit Chedang, Rasah Seremban. It is frequently
Figure 1.2: Real site at T-Intersection
observed that in a rapidly growing city like Seremban, traffic congestion and long queues at intersections occur during peak hours. This problem is mainly due to the poor co-ordination between adjacent traffic signal controls resulting in inefficient progressive traffic flows. Other problems include the inability of existing
43