Officials have no answers

Banker Sarwar Hossain becomes anxious every morning five days a week before starting for office in Motijheel from his Uttara home due to horrific traffic congestion in the capital.

“Sometimes it feels like I am just wasting my life. How can I do my job efficiently if I spend hours on the streets everyday? Sometimes I spend up to four hours on streets on the way to office and home,” he said. “Being painfully stuck in traffic is taking its toll on my mental health. It’s really awful.”

It’s not the story of Sarwar only. Commuters in the capital city are frustrated and angry for the city’s daily traffic chaos, which also costs the economy of million dollars every year.

With 18.10 lakh registered vehicles and population of over 22 million in Dhaka alone such a mess is expected in a megacity where traffic management is still rudimentary and road infrastructure is dilapidated.

According to a 2018 study conducted by BUET’s Accident Research Institute, Dhaka’s traffic waste around 5 million work hours and cost the economy Tk 37,000 crore annually. According to other survey done by the government’s BIDS and Dhaka-based thinktank Policy Research Institute (PRI), approximately 6 to 10 per cent of the country’s GDP is indirectly lost due to traffic chaos every year.

Because of ongoing construction of metro-rail, bus rapid transport (BRT) and broken footpaths and dilapidated roads, traffic chaos has reached to its peak in the recent months.

Officials involved with such projects or traffic management unable to predict when this chaos will conclude.

A worst traffic chaos has been disrupting people’s movement on Tongi-Banani Road via Uttara and Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport areas for months. Many people have missed their flights due to traffic congestion on this route. Sometimes, it takes about two hours to cross the airport area alone and if someone’s luck is bad, two to three hours won’t be enough to reach Paltan or Motijheel area via this way.

Mohammed Raihan, another resident of Uttara, goes to the Bangladesh Secretariat from his home to attend his office.

“On rare occasions, I can make the journey within 1.5 hours from Uttara to my office. It usually depends on the road being free of traffic. Most of the time, I get stuck at the airport area in Banani and Tejgaon for hours,” said Raihan.

Some other routes where traffic gridlock has reached to an unprecedented level are Tejgaon-Farmgate-Shahbagh-Dhanmondi, Gulshan-Banani-Badda-Kuril and Gulistan-Paltan-Motijheel.

Md Ferdous, who goes to Paltan from Bashundhara Residential Area for work, said that it takes at least two hours for him to make the journey if he leaves early in the morning.