Sagar Biswas :
There would be specific colour bus for specific city route with certain colour ticket for different route passengers. The buses would leave the station whether there is any passenger or not. The flyovers will play vital role to keep continuing faster speed of the traffic. Keeping adjustment with the bus service, the metro rails will ply one after another. Articulated [trolleybus] or double-decker buses will be plied through the separate lanes. Besides, the circular riverine and rail routes around the city will allow the city dwellers to choose alternate mood of their transport.
Like the world’s mega cities, the commuters of capital Dhaka could go one end to the other end without entering the city during the busy business hours. It should be the real scenario of Dhaka to get rid of nagging traffic jam!
But unfortunately, it is still a far reaching dream for us. Although the government has taken a mega project with an approximated cost of Tk 159,000crore to build up a coordinate transport system for Dhaka city by 2035, the efforts are apparently going in vain due to farsightedness, poor planning and widespread corruption.
It is fact that, the buses are the main player of the mass transit system in Dhaka city. In contrary, the total road length of bus operating route is around 200 km including 22 east-west links which is covering only around one third of the city.
It doesn’t need to mention that the condition of public transport service, especially public bus operation, is very troublesome and unpleasant. The authorities concerned have failed to bring any discipline in this sector. The poor bus service is unable to meet the public demands.
The much-publicized special air-conditioned bus service Dhaka Chaka for the commuters in the posh diplomatic enclave Gulshan has become burden due to unplanned route and high fare. Especially, the state-run operator Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation [BRTC] has failed to meet the public demand mainly due to corruption and administrative incapability. At present, BRTC is a “white elephant” for the government. The public bus operating remains under one command in major cities across the world to provide best service. But in Bangladesh, the public bus operation is running in a haphazard way. There is widespread allegation that most of the BTRC buses are being used for different purposes other than regular public transportation. It is seen that the BRTC plays no role in easing public sufferings when private operators used to put their buses off the streets during any government drive against unfit buses. It is astonishing that 1,052 of the 1,532 busses of BRTC fleet are now in operation, including 481 in the capital, and the rest are at workshops for repairing. In Dhaka, 263 are running as city services, while 124 are running as staff busses of different organisations, 70 as students buses for different educational institutions, 16 as women bus services, four as school busses and four as training buses. Most strangely, the BRTC officials openly said they could not operate city services other cities except Dhaka being opposed by the private transport owners. The Dhaka North City Corporation [DNCC] authorities last year had planned to bring down the number of the bus operating companies to five from 300 to improve the public transport system in the city. It was also decided to introduce 3,000 new buses to be run by five operators. The plan has yet not executed the reasons best known to the DNCC Mayor Annisul Huq. The Mayor, however, did not elaborate the problems. On the other hand, the Dhaka South City Corporation [DSCC] Mayor Syeed Khokan has not such a plan to ease public sufferings by introducing comfortable bus service. Apart from ease bus service, there is another big problem for the good transportation. That is traffic jam. Experts say, there is a very few scope to expand the city roads without destroying the road-side infrastructures. But actually it is very difficult. Besides, it would be huge burden of the fragile economy. So, this scarcity of the road length or road area would be sustaining until the such mood of city remains.
Pointing the issue, urban expert Professor Nazrul Islam had said it is necessary to implement all the mass transit related projects recommended in Strategic Transport Plan [STP] for capital with a high priority.
He said: “We’ll have to focus on better traffic management by reducing small vehicles like car, microbus, auto-rickshaw and rickshaw with proper law enforcement. There’re clear outlines in the STP to get rid of traffic jams. If the STP can be implemented alongside the Detailed Area Plan [DAP], traffic congestions will be reduced.”
“The government needs to take some drastic actions to resolve the traffic congestions instead of building flyovers. The long-term solution is to decentralise so that people do not need to come to Dhaka. In short term, we have to take radical measures to control the use of cars and land in Dhaka and we have to introduce Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] and promote non-motorised transport,” Dr Mohammad Shakil Akther, professor of Buet, said recently. According to a Buet study, the Dhaka city experiences rapid growth of scattered and unplanned development [73% fully unplanned] without appropriate guidance resulting in immense land use and transport problems.
Meanwhile, the continuous focus on road based transport system has weakened the potentialities and attractiveness of other types of transportation system. There has no integration between different modes and sub-modes, whereas one is depriving others. The interchange or interface facilities between different modes and sub modes are also very poor and at present condition it is almost very difficult to introduce well defined fully functional multi-modal transport system in the city. Unplanned and uncontrolled exposition of the city also induce around 4000 indiscriminate and unexpected road side garments industries with more than 1 millions employee which is generating almost 2.5 millions trips per day. Almost 75 percent of those industries are located along the primary roads and the rest are along the secondary roads and creating mammoth adverse impact on the city, the experts said.
