Minister says building more roads does not eliminate traffic congestion in cities

World experience shows that building more roads does not mean eliminating traffic jams on the streets, stated Minister of Digital Development and Transport Rashad Nabiyev at the event titled "Cities at the Center of Connectivity: Urban Reconstruction and Regional Cooperation" organized within the framework of the 13th session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13) held in Baku, Report informs.

According to him, one of the most important issues is that there were previously beliefs in society that we needed to build more roads: "We thought of the roads and the entire system with a very unified approach. Roads should feed bus networks, buses should feed railways, and railways should feed the metro. From our perspective, each travel zone should strengthen the next layer. By doing this, we will have a more unified approach to city mobility."

The minister noted that today, the return on investment is of crucial importance when deciding where to spend the next dollar: "In our vision, this is measured in minutes. What I mean by minutes is how few minutes our citizens spend when traveling to school, healthcare centers, or even their workplaces in the city. So, we actually shifted our decision-making process from considering the return on investment of a dollar to equating the dollar to minutes of personal life. Over the last four years, the Azerbaijani citizen has been the main and essential pillar at the center of every decision we have made so far."