Mar 21, Colombo: The average speed of vehicles traveling between Wellawatta, the southern entry point to the city of Colombo to Fort, the city centre is 7km per hour.

This was revealed by a research conducted by the Transport Engineering Department of University of Moratuwa. The situation is similar on the other accesses roads also.

This snail phase causes a huge waste of fuel and time. It increases the pollution of the city air.

Air Resources Management Centre recently announced that the contribution of vehicles to the air pollution is 63%. Ill maintained vehicles are the nastiest pollutant makers.

At the end of 2005 there were 2.53 million vehicles registered in Sri Lanka and of them around 2 million vehicles are used everyday. Each day 630 vehicles are added to this number.

Last year 229,669 vehicles were registered. Of them 130,696 were motor bicycles and 41,085 were trishaws, which cause severe air pollution because most of them have two stroke petrol engines.

Sri Lanka's road network is incapable to bear the uncontrolled inflow of vehicles. Worse traffic jams are expected in city roads by the end of this year.

Source: http://www.colombopage.com/archive/March21130758SL.html