Pakistan’s roads reflect the broader dysfunction of its governance system: disorganised, improvised and reactive. Every few months, a new chief traffic officer (CTO) assumes office in Lahore or Karachi, promising reform, digitisationand discipline.
Yet despite these recurring campaigns, little changes in the experience of daily commuters. Traffic remains chaotic, enforcement is inconsistent and citizens are caught in a system where fines have increased but compliance mechanisms remain inaccessible. The result is a model of governance that prioritises appearances over systemic reform.
The latest wave of fine increases began in Karachi, where the city’s traffic police announced a sharp rise in penalties for common violations, including lane indiscipline, signal breaking and helmetless riding. These measures were justified as deterrents to reckless driving and as a means to ‘restore civic discipline’. Yet the reforms have exposed a deeper flaw: the lack of a functioning, accessible system for payments and compliance.
In both cities, citizens report malfunctioning online challan portals, unresponsive helplines and long queues at manual counters. The online Fine Payment App frequently crashes or fails to register payments, while integration with mobile banking platforms remains unreliable. For many motorists, especially delivery riders and daily-wage workers, paying a fine can mean losing a day’s income or relying on informal agents to process challans. These inefficiencies turn deterrence into an administrative ordeal. A fine can only serve its purpose if it is accompanied by a transparent and functional system of compliance.
The dysfunction extends to the process of obtaining or renewing a driving license. Despite efforts to digitise, licensing offices remain plagued by procedural confusion and a lack of infrastructure. The surge in urban populations has outpaced institutional capacity, forcing provincial authorities to set up makeshift offices with minimal staffing and no standardised testing protocols.
Officers are often recruited without formal training in road safety, while the manual record-keeping system leaves room for both error and discretion. In this environment, corruption is not an aberration but a symptom of structural neglect.
These operational gaps mirror a deeper absence of strategic continuity. Pakistan’s traffic police departments remain reactive rather than policy-driven. Leadership changes occur frequently. Lahore alone has seen more than six CTOs in five years; each launching short-lived enforcement drives, from helmet crackdowns to digital challan pilots. Without institutional memory or long-term planning, reforms begin and end with the tenure of individual officers. The lack of an overarching national road safety policy further isolates local efforts, making coordination between cities and provinces almost nonexistent.
Funding constraints exacerbate these challenges. Traffic departments receive only a fraction of the provincial police budget, less than 6.0 per cent in Punjab, according to the 2024 Public Expenditure Report. Most funds are allocated to personnel costs, leaving little for technology upgrades, training or maintenance. Many officers operate without radios, proper uniforms or designated patrol vehicles. Field conditions are poor, and there are no clear career incentives for specialisation in traffic management. This absence of institutional investment reinforces a cycle of inefficiency and low morale.
Accountability mechanisms, though present on paper, remain weak in practice. Data from the Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA) shows that nearly one-third of e-challans issued through automated cameras remain unpaid due to inadequate follow-up or administrative loopholes. Manual ticketing leaves even more space for discretion. In Karachi, enforcement relies on physical checkpoints and spot fines, allowing for arbitrary negotiation. For many drivers, penalties have become negotiable inconveniences rather than deterrents grounded in law.
The consequences of this dysfunction are not limited to enforcement: they extend to how cities are planned and governed. There is almost no coordination between the traffic police, transport authorities and municipal departments responsible for road design. Infrastructure projects such as underpasses, flyovers and bus corridors are often planned without consulting enforcement data or traffic flow studies. This disconnect results in roads engineered for volume rather than regulation. Karachi’s corridor system and Lahore’s signal-free routes have increased driving speeds but not compliance, revealing how infrastructure expansion without parallel enforcement reform only amplifies risk.
Public perception of the traffic police reflects these contradictions. For most citizens, traffic regulation is viewed not as a public service but as an unpredictable encounter. The absence of consistent public education campaigns or transparent data on fine collections has reinforced scepticism about intent. The perception that fines are designed for revenue generation, rather than safety, undermines civic cooperation. When citizens experience digital breakdowns and arbitrary enforcement simultaneously, compliance loses moral legitimacy.
To its credit, the Punjab Safe Cities Authority’s e-challan system remains a partial success. Automating violations through camera networks has reduced direct human interaction and corruption opportunities. However, its effectiveness remains limited to select urban zones and depends on functional integration with payment gateways. Smaller districts, where manual enforcement still dominates, remain disconnected from this digital infrastructure. Without a unified provincial or national traffic database, repeat offenders cannot be tracked, and penalties cannot be scaled with consistency.
Ultimately, Pakistan’s traffic policing crisis is a microcosm of its broader governance dilemma: institutions that function through ad-hoc fixes rather than coherent frameworks. The recurring fine revisions and short-lived digital drives reflect a preference for visibility over capacity. A meaningful solution requires continuity in leadership, institutional investment in personnel and technology, and alignment between traffic management and urban planning.
Until such reforms take root, the country’s traffic system will continue to illustrate a familiar paradox of governance: a state that enforces compliance without enabling it. Fines will rise, campaigns will rotate and new CTOs will announce digitisation drives, but the experience on Pakistan’s roads will remain the same. Order, like reform, will stay aspirational, suspended between rhetoric and reality.
The writer is a transnational educational consultant, freelance columnist and policy analyst based in Lahore.