Doha: The economic cost (lost of productivity) of traffic congestion in 2018 is estimated to be between QR5.5bn and QR6.9bn which means a loss of about 0.9-1.1 percent of the GDP, according to the 3rd annual Qatar Traffic Report (QTR) for year 2018 released by the Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC) yesterday.
“The average number of extra hours spent due to congestion is 98 hours per commuter (16 minutes per day) while it was 109 hours in 2016. This indicates that road projects completed by Ashghal in 2018 had a positive impact on traffic flow,” said Dr. Adnan Abu-Dayya, the Executive Director of QMIC.
He also said in a press conference, held at the QMIC’s offices in Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP), that over the years, QMIC took significant efforts to build a comprehensive data collection network and the associated data intelligence that allowed it to build a valuable data bank about traffic and mobility behaviour in Qatar.
“February, March, and November 2018 were the most congested months in the year with a Congestion Index of 28.8 percent. The highest congestion period during the work days is the evening peak (around 6-7pm) during which the average congestion index is 33.8 percent,” he pointed out.
Abu-Dayya noted: “In the morning peak hours of work days, Monday had the highest congestion index of 33 percent and Thursdays had the lowest congestion index of 31 percent.”
“We expect traffic behaviour to keep improving as key ongoing road projects are completed in 2019 and the Doha metro starts operation in the next 1-2 years,” he said.
The QMIC used its Advanced Traffic Monitoring & Analytics Platform (Masarak) to prepare the information.
It presents unique insights about traffic congestion and movement in Qatar throughout the year, across major road segments and during different periods of the day. The report also looks at results from previous years and makes comparisons to track the changes over time.
Over 1.5 billion records of data, coming from major road segments in Qatar, were collected by the Masarak advanced traveler info system and taken into consideration.
The importance of such detailed report can be observed by various national and private entities as it represents a score card about mobility behavior in Qatar.
It is considered the only report of its kind to analyze data acquired from multiple sources and benchmarked against an existing and rich bank of information accumulated over the years.
