Owing to the mushroom increase in vehicular traffic during the last five years, the federal government is planning to construct 100,000-kilometre roads network to overcome traffic and road communication related problems.
Road density is an important factor for economic growth of a country but, unfortunately, it is very low in Pakistan, which is 0.32 kilometre per square kilometre, sources told Business Recorder here on Friday.
"Balochistan is required more roads than Punjab, however, it has only 0.12 per km road density", they added. The introduction of car financing/leasing schemes with government facilitation by financing institutions has contributed a lot to the rapid increase of vehicular traffic.
Despite the sharp increase in vehicles no effective policy has been evolved yet to cater the increasing demands of roads network of the growing population, they said. In wake of this situation, the department has sent a proposal to Islamabad regarding to work out an effective road-transportation mechanism. The proposals are being mulled seriously and hopefully would be approved, they added.
According to a joint survey conducted by National Highways Authority (NHA) and World Bank, 47 percent of highways network were in deteriorated condition and only 28 percent of the network were in good shape.
They advocated of involving the private sector in construction of new highways and evolving a comprehensive road transpiration mechanism for bringing improvement in the situation. They attributed the deterioration of road network in the country to rapid increase in traffic volumes besides insufficient funding to maintain highways and embezzlement of the funds by concerned officials.