URBAN CONTEXT AND MOTORCYCLIST COMPLIANCE: A BIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF TRAFFIC SIGNAL VIOLATION BEHAVIOUR ACROSS LAHORE, FAISALABAD AND MULTAN, PAKISTAN

Abstract

Signal violation in urban intersections is one of the most prevalent traffic control shortcomings in low and middle income countries, but the frequencies of signal violations across cities within a single national or provincial jurisdiction have not been extensively analysed. The current paper presents a bivariate analysis of the self-reported violation of traffic signals among 450 motorcyclists sampled in three major cities of Punjab, Pakistan (Lahore, Faisalabad and Multan) in a larger doctoral study using a mixed method approach. Measures of self-reported violation frequency and traffic awareness, perceived enforcement, infrastructure quality, social influence and psychological factors were obtained on a structured questionnaire, along with a battery of socio-demographic factors. Bivariate procedures were Pearson correlation, Welch's robust F test and Kruskal-Wallis test (as parametric tests) followed by Tukey and Games-Howell post hoc tests, and chi-square tests on categorical enforcement, infrastructure and attribution items. The results show that there is a significant difference in the violation behaviour between the three cities (F(2, 447) = 10.14, p < .001, η² = .043) with riders from Faisalabad reporting the highest and those from Lahore the lowest frequency of violation. The bivariate level associations between the variables revealed that only psychological factors correlated significantly with violation, r = .11, p = .020. The three different urban regimes revealed by chi-square analyses are: personal, on-street enforcement environment in Faisalabad; camera-mediated, low-personal-enforcement environment in Lahore; and infrastructure-deficient environment in Multan. The findings validate the notion that the city can be considered to be an autonomous behavioural environment and cast doubt on the individual level informational model that has been used for many road-safety interventions in Pakistan.