Elevated highways, smart tech needed to ease urban congestion; up to 6m vehicles on highways daily: LLM

According to the Malaysian Highway Authority (LLM), the need to develop new highways and adopt smart technologies is evident due to the increase in the number of vehicles and highway usage, which has now reached up to six million vehicles daily, reported Bernama.

“We are committed to developing the toll highway network in Malaysia because the need is clearly there, especially as many areas and cities are now facing traffic congestion. At the same time, we are also seeing a fairly high increase in traffic volume. Based on daily monitoring, more than 5.5 million to six million vehicles use our highways every day,” said LLM director-general Datuk Mohd Hadzmir Yusoff.

The Malaysian Highway Authority is also placing emphasis on the continuity of highway network development, while ensuring that every project complies with stipulated technical and safety standards from the planning stage through to operations, Mohd Hadzmir said.

Observations by LLM on the New Pantai Expressway 2 (NPE2) extension project found that more than 200,000 vehicles use the NPE daily, and that the highway’s capacity is no longer sufficient to accommodate the growing demand, according to the director-general.

“With the existing three lanes, the capacity is insufficient and the level of service is at Level E, which is quite congested. Therefore, we will add two more elevated lanes, bringing the total to five lanes,” he said.

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras will be used to monitor works live, and enable immediate action to be taken should any incident occur, thus enhancing safety throughout the construction period, he added. LLM is also moving towards the development of smart highways through the use of artificial intelligence automatically detect accidents and traffic violations.

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