Ensure hassle free commuting 

The bane of city life is the daily battle one has to encounter on roads to reach the workplace or home. Modern living demands both men and women should work to enhance family income and for this purpose they will have to go out of the house on a daily basis. Besides going to the office, they also have to go out for other reasons like taking children to school, visiting hospitals or going shopping. Such regular undertakings necessitate using either private or public transport. But in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, venturing out for any purpose on weekdays turns out to be a nightmarish experience. One has to stand at the bus stop under the blazing sun for about an hour before he or she can find a little space to stand on the foothold of the bus. The jostling, the dust and the grime in the hour-long journey will squeeze all energy for work out of the commuter.

This is true for those who commute by public bus. But there is no reason to believe that those who are sitting inside the air-cooled private cars are enjoying the hour-long delay in the never-ending traffic congestion. The standstill situation for an hour equally saps energy of those inside the cool car as they are perhaps on their way to attend an important business meeting or to catch a flight.  

The delay on the roads may prove to be costly as one may lose a job or a business contract. Traffic congestion has taken lives too when the ambulance carrying a patient in critical condition could not reach the hospital in time. While private and public transports wait in a jam, expensive fuel burns and valuable man hours are lost, which is reflected in the GDP of the country.

The World Bank in a 2017 report said that traffic congestion in Dhaka eats up 32 lakh working hours every day with an annual economic cost of Tk 20,000 crore.

What is wrong with our traffic control system? Why could we not install a system like they have done in many similar small cities? It is often argued by the citizens that instead of the faulty digital devices the old system of controlling traffic flow by hand by traffic constables was more effective. The vehicles on the road do halt watching the hand signal of the traffic policeman ignoring the lights.

Reportedly, digital signal devices have been installed on important road sections over 20 years ago. And since then, about 150 crore takas have been spent on purchasing such equipment to bring cohesion in the roads. Between 2002 and 2005, a total of 68 traffic lights were set up at a cost of Tk 13.6 crore under the Dhaka Urban Transport Project funded by the WB. The first two sets of traffic lights were installed at Gulshan-1 and Gulshan -2 intersections. But, in a 2006 report, the WB mentioned that the lights went out of order due to lack of maintenance.

Then again, under the Clean Air and Sustainable Environment (CASE) project, Tk 112 crore, funded by the WB, were spent between 2010 and 2018 on repairing and installing 100 traffic lights and other intersection infrastructure. The city corporations handed the lights over to the Dhaka Metropolitan Police.

Unfortunately, after paying the suppliers crores in payment, most of those signals become useless within months of installation. As a result, we observe massive gridlock everywhere from dawn to midnight. This needs to be said that we hardly see such demonstration of mismanagement on roads in other cities in the region.    

Dhaka’s two city corporations, Dhaka Metropolitan Police, and Dhaka Transport Coordination Authority have been blaming each other for the perennial traffic congestion in the city. The urban planners find an acute lack of coordination and accountability among the agencies when working on the roads. At the same time, several mega infrastructural development projects, including the Metrorail and Elevated Expressway, narrowed down major thoroughfares in the capital.

We hope the relevant authorities will work together to find a solution to this age-old problem.