Impact of the Punjab Highway Patrol on Road Crime Prevention and Traffic Management: Evidence from the Faisalabad Region, Pakistan

Abstract

Road crime and traffic insecurity continue to be major threats to public safety in low and middle-income countries. Although the Punjab Highway Patrol (PHP) has been steadily expanding since its inception in 2004 as an all-eve-focused highway policing service, the hard evidence to support the service on a commuter basis is still limited. Since the existing literature mainly focuses on the Lahore area, with its unique crime rate, and the Faisalabad area is one of the busiest agro-industrial transport corridors in the province of Punjab, no study has been conducted to assess the performance of PHP in Faisalabad region. The present study redresses this void and makes several new contributions to the literature: it integrates for the first time, the institutional crime-trend records from 2004 to 2026 with a structured commuter survey; it compares the PHP against the federal National Highways and Motorway Police crime-trend records from 2004 to 2019 and against the international patrol-policing evidence; and it presents a composite PHP Effectiveness Index. A cross-sectional design was used in this study with 160 commuters in four districts, with bivariate associations tested using chi-square and gamma statistics.. Reported highway crime fell from a pre-PHP baseline of 687 incidents to an annual range of 3 to 53 cases across 2005 to 2026, though the decline was interrupted by a 2021-2022 rebound plausibly linked to post-COVID-19 conditions. Commuters reported largely favourable perceptions of PHP's integrity, crime-prevention effectiveness, and traffic management, and these perceptions were significantly associated with education, income, and satisfaction, though not with age. Benchmarked internationally, PHP's perceived effectiveness is high, but it still trails comparators on technology adoption. These findings fill a documented evidence gap for South Asian highway policing and offer a replicable, low-cost model for future research and policy use.