The recommendations from a seminar in the city on Saturday that the cost of traffic jam can be brought down to halve if proper actions were taken deserve careful consideration. The suggestion that the government can halve the number of buses from 6,000 without causing transport shortage if new buses being introduced under State owned Management deserves consideration.
It is important as the study suggested to reshape the city transport system, but ruling party men owning private buses are opposed to any change. The mass transport system need to be managed by forming a separate state-owned company to regulate the system is noteworthy. The public transport sector should be run directly by the government and it should get subsidies is also important. The government’s more emphasis on metro rail and similar big projects involving costly services, instead of giving attention to cost-effective system also deserves reviews. Big projects are not supposed to address the problem bigger way but the cost burden may offset the benefits.
Parking on streets; encroachment of arterial or critical junctions by construction work, waste bins or other things; occupied footpaths; competition of buses for passengers; and picking and dropping of passengers on city roads must also stop to stop frequent accidents.
The disclosure showed traffic congestion causes an annual loss of between Tk 20 thousand to Tk 55 thousand crore and most strikingly about 50 to 70 percent of the losses can be avoided through proper actions. It is really sensitive when it said people of Dhaka generate 36 million trips per day and thirty five percent of those are work trips. Buses are used for 36.97 percent trips.
It is obvious the office-goers are biggest sufferers, both in terms of overcrowding inside buses, extra hours losses to reach offices and the financial value of such time as well as fatigue and physical sufferings. Many people who come from outside the city just sleep at home at night coming home late in the evening and starting for office early in the morning. They have no family life and social exposure except on public holidays. Dhaka is becoming bigger every day and unless transport system changes soon the city will become almost unlivable.
