Highlighting the Ongoing Roads Infrastructure Challenges: Car Ownership Rates in Iraq

Abstract

                Vehicles that use highway facilities have increased rapidly last decades mainly due to increasing of population and also due to industrials development for vehicles.  In Iraq, it has been noticed that the car ownership has been increased since the year of 2003.  This paper uses real data taken from the Central Statistical Organization of Iraq (CSO) to focus on car ownership in Iraq as a whole as well as focusing on each province separately.  The finding of this paper highlighted the ongoing traffic problems due to sharp increase in the number of vehicles and the unusual traffic growth rate.  The expected number of vehicles during the next 10 years is estimated and expected to increase from 4.5 million on 2013 to be as minimum as 11 million private cars.  This will create a new challenge for Iraq roads infrastructure which must be enhanced significantly so as to cover such increase in traffic.  The results suggest that the average car ownership per 1000 people is increased from 58 to 124 from 2003 to 2013.  The average car ownership per households has also increased from 0.39 to 0.83 vehicles per households.  Significant differences in car ownership rates are found among Kurdistan, middle and south regions in Iraq. The annual traffic growth rate during the last 10 years of 11.5% is found which is much higher than the population growth rate of 3.14%.