Impact of Climate Change on Traffic Controls in Developing Countries

Severity of climate condition is becoming more frequent, therefore it much important to be very clear about the influence of climate on road users daily travelling pattern. Climate change has much effect on the aspects of transportation systems such as. Climate change is three dimensional which are exposed, sensitive and low adaptive capacity to traffic highway. Although these dimensions of climate impact on traffic highway are measurable and predominant, they need potential adapters to monitor and support the adaptive response, potential persisted to monitor population trend and high latent risk to monitor the environment. This includes traffic demand, traffic safety and traffic operation relationships. Furthermore, research as established that severe climate change such as winter storm brings about 25 times the normality of vehicular crashes, this is however, much higher than the risk brought by the road users behavior. The risk of drivers involved in a vehicular crashes becomes more intense as a result of extreme weather conditions. Thus, there is a need for the transportation related authorities to manage and restrict the use of highways during extreme condition in order to vehicle operation cost and other related cost. Nevertheless, the first step by transportation agencies to manage transportation systems to minimize the weather impact is to quantify its impact on traffic on highways.

Thus, this paper presents a review of the impact of climate condition on traffic demand, traffic safety and traffic operation relationships. Using a case study area of Eastern Cape Province in South Africa, accident reports were collected from secondary sources and analyzed. Overall, a relationship is drawn on the impact of climate condition and travel fatality. Furthermore, traffic regulation recommendations based on the impact of climate conditions will be drawn.