From Urban Growth to Road Risk: A Safer Mobility Agenda for Tashkent

CAP Uzbekistan POLICY BRIEF No 4 by Farrukh Irnazarov, May 4, 2026

The key policy implication is that road safety in Tashkent is not just a transport-enforcement issue. It is a metropolitan development issue. As the city expands, travel demand is rising faster than safe multimodal access.

Farrukh Irnazarov is a development economist, researcher, and project manager from Uzbekistan with over 15 years of experience in economic development, investment policy, urbanization, agribusiness, trade, labor migration, and regional cooperation. He is the Co-Founder and Country Director for Uzbekistan at the Central Asian Development Institute and CEO of RANSIF Group, where he leads policy research, advisory work, and strategic initiatives across Central Asia.

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Key Messages

• Tashkent’s road safety problem is driven less by individual behavior alone than by rapid urban growth, stronger commuting flows, and infrastructure that has not adapted quickly enough to rising mobility demand.
• Crash exposure is shaped more by movement intensity and corridor function than by residential density alone. High-risk locations are likely to be radial corridors, bus-stop environments, and mixed-use arterials rather than simply the densest districts.
• Recent planning and transport reforms create an opening for change, but safety outcomes will improve only if Tashkent 2045 and Uzbekistan 2030 treat road deaths and serious injuries as core performance indicators.

Why this matters

Tashkent is growing quickly and changing spatially. The city’s permanent population rose from 2.694 million in 2021 to 3.113 million in 2025, reaching 3.178 million by early 2026. At the same time, new housing growth in peripheral districts such as Sergeli and Yangi Hayot, together with stronger metropolitan linkages to Kibray and the wider fringe, is reorganizing everyday movement across the capital. This means more long-distance commuting, more radial flows into central employment and service areas, and more daily interaction among cars, buses, taxis, and pedestrians.

The key policy implication is that road safety in Tashkent is not just a transport-enforcement issue. It is a metropolitan development issue. As the city expands, travel demand is rising faster than safe multimodal access. Where wide roads, high operating speeds, incomplete pedestrian facilities, and heavy bus-stop activity overlap, ordinary trips become riskier. In that sense, road trauma is one of the ways in which uneven urban growth becomes visible.

Figure 1. Tashkent city population growth

Main findings

1. Urban growth is expanding exposure faster than safety protection. Population growth and peripheral housing development are increasing the number, length, and complexity of daily trips. In a city where employment, higher education, retail, and administration remain strongly concentrated, suburban expansion produces longer journeys and heavier dependence on a limited number of arterial corridors. These corridors are expected to carry commuter traffic, local access, feeder transport, and pedestrian movement at the same time. The result is a structural mismatch between mobility demand and the safety architecture of the street network.

2. Infrastructure modernization is real, but it is not yet consistently safety-oriented. Tashkent has invested in both roads and public transport. Metro ridership rose from 101.8 million passengers in 2021 to 286.8 million in 2025. Bus fleets have also expanded and been modernized. Yet these gains do not automatically produce safer mobility. The safety effect of transport investment depends on whether road and transit improvements are integrated with crossings, sidewalks, safer intersections, and lower-speed design. Where that integration is weak, modernization may improve traffic flow without adequately protecting vulnerable users.

3. Pedestrian exposure is the core urban safety challenge. Crash data indicate a persistent and structurally urban safety problem. Officially registered crashes rose from 1,073 in 2021 to 1,280 in 2024, before falling slightly to 1,225 in 2025. Road deaths reported in public sources remained high, and pedestrian-involved crashes were especially prominent: 720 of the 1,280 officially registered crashes in 2024 involved pedestrians. This suggests that the principal safety challenge in Tashkent is not merely driver-to-driver collision risk. It lies in the interface between motorized traffic and everyday urban access.

4. Density alone does not explain where crashes occur. District-level evidence suggests that accident totals are more strongly associated with population size and movement intensity than with residential density alone. Yunusabad and Chilanzar record the highest accident totals, but the pattern across districts is not a simple density hierarchy. Bektemir is especially revealing: despite its low residential density, it still records a substantial safety burden, likely because of corridor function, freight activity, or through-traffic. This means that safety interventions should target high-exposure corridors and gateways rather than only the densest neighborhoods.

5. The policy window is open, but implementation must change. Tashkent 2045 and Uzbekistan 2030 create a strategic opportunity to align metropolitan growth, transport modernization, and road safety. Yet that opportunity will be lost if planning continues to evaluate success primarily through capacity, speed, or congestion relief. The city needs a stronger Safe System orientation: streets must be designed so that ordinary human mistakes do not produce death or serious injury.

Key recommendations for decision-makers

1. Make road safety a core metropolitan planning requirement. Road safety should be built directly into Tashkent 2045, district development plans, and major infrastructure approvals. Every major corridor reconstruction, housing expansion zone, and transport investment should be assessed for pedestrian exposure, transit access, crossing demand, and serious-injury risk before implementation. Road safety impact assessment should become standard practice, especially in peripheral growth areas.

2. Target the high-risk corridors first. The evidence indicates that risk is concentrated where commuting intensity, bus and taxi activity, pedestrian demand, and high speeds overlap. Tashkent should identify a first set of priority corridors linking peripheral districts to key employment and service zones and prepare integrated corridor safety plans for each. These plans should combine speed management, safer intersections, protected crossings, stop-access redesign, lighting, and continuous sidewalks. A corridor-based approach will be more effective than thinly spreading resources across the entire city.

3. Put speed management at the center of road safety policy. Speed is the factor that most directly turns conflict into fatality. Tashkent should move beyond posted limits alone and adopt a citywide speed-management program based on design and enforcement together. That means lower target speeds in mixed-use corridors, school zones, and bus-stop environments; self-enforcing street geometry; and wider use of automated enforcement in high-risk locations. Roads that function as urban access streets should not operate as quasi-highways.

4. Redesign the city around pedestrian desire lines. Many pedestrian risks emerge because infrastructure follows formal traffic logic while people walk along real routes to bus stops, schools, markets, and neighborhood destinations. Tashkent should expand crossing opportunities on wide arterials, close sidewalk gaps in peripheral districts, improve visibility and lighting, and make safer routes to schools and major transit stops a first-order priority. Pedestrian safety should be treated as both a transport issue and a public-health equity issue.

5. Use public transport reform as a safety strategy. Transit modernization can reduce private-vehicle dependence and organize movement more safely, but only if access to public transport is also safe. Metro and bus improvements should therefore be paired with better feeder connections, safer stop placement, protected boarding environments, and secure first- and last-mile walking routes. In peripheral districts, this is essential to prevent long and unsafe walking approaches from undermining the safety benefits of transit expansion.

6. Build a metropolitan road safety observatory. Tashkent needs better integrated open data. Crash records, health data, traffic counts, speed data, and land-use information should be brought into one analytical platform capable of identifying high-risk corridors and tracking whether interventions are working. Stronger data will improve targeting, accountability, and coordination across agencies.

Figure 2. Registered crashes and road deaths in Tashkent

Why Tashkent is distinctive

Tashkent is not well described by the usual urban road safety categories. It is not a mature high-income city with stabilized mobility patterns and fully institutionalized Safe System governance. But it is also not a city where planning is absent or informality is the dominant organizing principle. Instead, Tashkent is a post-socialist capital with a strong state-planning legacy, wide arterial roads, a significant inherited public transport backbone, and rapid current redevelopment. That combination matters because it means that institutional choices still have significant leverage. The city can still redirect its trajectory if safety is mainstreamed early enough.

Short-term implementation priorities

In the near term, the most practical agenda is to do four things at once. First, adopt a short list of priority corridors and intersections for treatment, using pedestrian crashes, bus-stop activity, and speed risk as the main criteria. Second, launch a visible speed-management package combining design changes and camera-based enforcement. Third, make pedestrian improvements around schools, transit stops, and peripheral housing areas the first wave of capital spending. Fourth, create an interagency coordination mechanism linking city planning, transport, police, health, and district authorities. These are manageable steps, but together they can shift the city from reacting to crashes toward preventing them.

Priority actions for decision-makers

Bottom line

Tashkent does not primarily need a more reactive road safety policy. It needs a more safety-centered model of urban development. The city’s current road safety burden is a growth-management problem: the spatial organization of housing, infrastructure, commuting, and street design is producing exposure faster than protection. The most effective response is therefore not a single measure, but a shift in urban governance. If Tashkent aligns planning, transport, speed management, and pedestrian protection under a Safe System framework, it can continue to grow without accepting road deaths and serious injuries as the normal cost of modernization.

Evidence base

This brief summarizes the paper “From Urban Growth to Road Risk: Infrastructure, Exposure, and Safety Governance in Tashkent.” It draws on National Statistics Committee data, transport and media reporting cited in the paper, and international road safety literature, including OECD/ITF, WHO, and World Bank sources.

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