Urban Transport Strategy. Management in Developing Countries John A Cracknell, страница 47

5.5.2.    Even if universities-colleges-institutes in developing cities offer traffic management courses, due to lack of exposure to current practice in the field and there is a need to

assist in improve standards of academic training.  Agencies such as the WBI or other international agencies could perhaps play a role in this area.  For example, WBI has often run project -based transport courses in their Washington HQ but these are expensive to run, reach relatively very few people and are short in duration.  More use could be made of modern technology and communications.  Investigations could be made of the practicality of establishing an Internet based, interactive courses in traffic management for engineers and planners working in developing cities.  There of course practical difficulties – a program would require contracting a training institute or university to design, set up and manage such a course and there are issues such as language, managing the course, funding and so forth but as PC-Internet connections are now commonplace in developing cities, such a course could reach a wide audience.

5.6         Training for traffic police in Bank projects

5.6.1.      Traffic police training in traffic management has been, or is being, included in a number of Bank urban transport projects such as San Jose (Costa Rica), Cairo (Egypt), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Moscow (Russia) (proposed), Mumbai (India) (proposed), Hanoi-Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam)(proposed), Venezuela, Karachi (Pakistan) and Calcutta (India).

5.6.2.      Police components in Bank projects usually comprise three main categories of intervention

a)  Equipment to assist traffic regulation enforcement such as patrol vehicles, communications equipment etc;

b)  Technical assistance for traffic accident reporting and analysis systems; and

c)  Technical assistance for training for traffic regulation enforcement.

5.6.3.      As far as is known, there are few evaluations of the impacts of traffic police components and thus only qualitative views can be given and, as with many aspects of the Review, generalisations which cover the range of city types in developing countries are virtually impossible.

5.6.4. Preparation of traffic police traffic management components is invariably difficult.  The reasons include:

a)  lack of appreciation by the traffic police of their role in traffic management.  As noted in Chapter 4, traffic police have a different approach to, and objectives of, traffic management compared to traffic planners.  The main objective traffic police is to “keep traffic moving” particularly traffic on main routes.  However, traffic police are not skilled in achieving a balanced approach to traffic movement.  The extreme examples have been demonstrated in cities like Bangkok and Manila where traffic police manage traffic signals manually and although they achieve high traffic throughputs, they cause immense delays.  Changing this culture has proved difficult particularly where innovative schemes (for the traffic police) are involved.  For example, sustained enforcement-success of with-flow bus lanes, standard in developed cities, has proved difficult in many developing cities.  Enforcement failure reduces the number of valuable options available to traffic planners;

b)  the independence of traffic police from the city traffic administration and their powers and ability to act in a uni-lateral manner.  In some cities, traffic police have powers to introduce traffic measures without reference to other agencies and as such can undermine traffic strategy.  On the other hand, it must be said that in some cities, the traffic police is the only agency ready to take action to resolve serious traffic issues (such as the installation of median strips in Colombo to prevent crossing traffic-accidents);