Impact of Pedal Powered Vehicles on Average Traffic Speed in Dhaka City: A Cross-sectional Study Based on Road Class and Timestamp

Traffic congestion has become one of the burning issues in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Despite being a megacity, the lack of adequate road space, uncontrolled vehicles, and dense population have left Dhaka stranded. Rickshaw, a three-wheeled pedal-powered slow vehicle, famous to the city dwellers, can be found running on most Dhaka city roads. So, rickshaw plays an indispensable role in estimating the average traffic speed of Dhaka city. This paper studies traffic patterns of Dhaka city intensively and calculates the average traffic speed of the town considering two significant aspects- 1) three road classes (primary, secondary and tertiary), and 2) four timestamps in a day (midnight, morning, afternoon and night). The timestamps are chosen so that it can reflect the condition of traffic intensity in Dhaka city based on the urbanites' quotidian activities. This paper estimates the average traffic speed on those three different road classes for each of the four different timestamps using 1,56,630 records traced from 25 different road segments for 15 days. The paper also estimates the rickshaw free roads' average speed and the non-rickshaw open roads to be 20 km/h and 11 km/h, respectively. Although the infrastructures are not the same for all streets, the findings in this paper possess an excellent estimation for the individual road and the whole city.