Road crashes shouldn’t be termed as `accidents’ since these incidents are not `acts of God’. In fact, there are several risk factors behind every crash, which are preventable. Road crashes can be occured due to various reasons including faulty road design, unfit vehicles, drivers’ inefficiency etc.
Chattogram City Corporation (CCC) Chief Engineer Shahin-ul Islam Chowdhury remarked at a workshop organized to improve the skills of engineers to ensure road safety. In the opening ceremony of the workshop, he said that CCC, Chittagong Development Authority (CDA), Police should work together to make the roads safe. He hopes that this workshop will help engineers to build safe roads in the future.
The World Resources Institute (WRI) organized a day-long capacity-building workshop for the Chattogram City Corporation (CCC) engineers titled ‘Collaborative Design Learning—On Ground Testing’. The workshop included an on-ground exercise of redesigning ‘Kaptai Rastar Matha’ intersection by the participants.
Earlier in 2022 and 2023, WRI delivered two successful workshops—“Creating Streets for All” and “Collaborative Design Learning Workshop- Intersection Design”. This is their third workshop of the capacity building series.
CCC has partnered with the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety (BIGRS) to reduce deaths and injuries from crashes on its streets. As a partner of this program, WRI supports cities with their technical expertise in developing safe streets and safe mobility across different geographies and contexts. In this workshop, WRI focused on the intersection design method with on-ground testing.
Masud Ahammed, Additional Commissioner (Traffic) of Chattogram Metroplitan Police (CMP) and Joynul Abedin, DC (Traffic-North), CMP chaired the event as special guests.
At the beginning of the workshop Dr. Mohammad Nurul Hassan, Deputy Team Leader and Transport Planner, Chattogram Metropolitan Masterplan Preparation Project delivered a brief presentation on “Safer Mobility Approach for Chattogram”. He emphasized on the issues with some of the existing intersections like Love Lane Intersection, Naval Avenue Junction, CRB Moar, etc.
Then WRI consultant Farzana Islam Toma described the design and On-ground Testing Process of intersection with a special case study on ‘Kaptai Rastar Matha’. She said that, “Every intersection’s context is unique and different, so testing the design before permanent execution is very much necessary to see if the design works perfectly. Moreover, the design can be also revised according to the testing observation with this process.”
In the workshop, the participants made up a few groups to do an exercise with Kaptai Rastar Matha Design and presented their ideas to the audience. An engaging discussion session followed up by each group’s design presentation with different concepts made the session more captivating.
Finally, the WRI team and the participants visited Kaptai Rastar Matha to install testing materials with WRI’s design. The workshop ended with the participants’ learning to do in-hand testing exercise on ground.
Executive engineers, assistant engineers and sub-assistant engineers from the Civil Department of CCC, and police officers from CMP’s traffic division, planners from Chattogram Development Authority, engineers from Roads and Highway department participated in the workshop.
