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DHAKA, the capital city of Bangladesh, is known worldwide, if anything, for its nightmarish traffic snarl and exploding demographics. What will this city look like, say a decade hence, is anyone's guess, if the present trend of its runaway growth continues unabated. The whole prospect really boggles one's mind. Forgetting about the veritable demographic bomb that the city has been inexorably turning into, for the time being, let the attention be focused on the hell that it has already become. At the moment more than 3,000 authorised buses and minibuses ply along some 77 routes within the city. This number, however, is not exhaustive, because there are also an unknown number of such large passenger-carrying vehicles that use the city roads illegally. Add to this the various other types of large, medium and small motorised vehicles carrying people and goods through the city streets. Need one also mention the ubiquitous rickshaws moving helter-skelter like swarms of locusts clogging the main roads as well as the lanes and alleys of the city?
How then are those in charge of looking after traffic discipline on the city roads managing their business? At the field level, the job is unquestionably a tough and messy one. While admitting to this undeniable fact of life in the city's traffic administration, one may inadvertently fall into the trap of providing an excuse for the corrupt and inefficient officials of the traffic department. In fact, the unwieldy traffic situation of the city is turning from bad to worse, thanks to the whims and lack of planning on the part of the authorities concerned. If one even excuses the ballooning vehicular population of the city, one cannot still excuse the government or more particularly its department responsible for the planning the urban expansion of a capital city. During all these years, the government has not been able to add a single mile to the existing road network of the city to accommodate its inflating vehicular demography. On the contrary, it has only increased the number of bus routes for the new transports pressed into service from time to time. But for efficient management of a modern city's traffic system, 25 per cent of its total space have to be dedicated for the roads. Unfortunately, the capital city has less than one third (eight per cent, to be more exact) of its space available for the movement of vehicles.
Against this backdrop, one would like to take heart from the news that the communications ministry is going to implement the second phase of the Dhaka Urban Transport Project (DUTP) at an astronomical cost of Tk. 21.66 billion in the next five years. However, a closer scrutiny of the project will reveal that it also does not promise any light at the end of the tunnel either. For, by improvement of the city's traffic system, what the authorities mean is expansion of the city's bus network by way of increasing the number of routes, not roads. The roads -- the existing ones, of course -- will be addressed only through their renovation in the southwestern part of the city. The story was not different even in the case of the first phase of the DUTP, which was completed at a huge cost of Tk. 10 billion. What the city got in the phase-I of the project includes the Mohakhali flyover, a few inter-district bus terminals and renovation of the traffic signals. Building of new roads always remained beyond the purview of the urban planners or the communications ministry in these two DUTP ventures. Small wonder that the prospect of an efficient management of the city's traffic system is again back to square one. To all appearances, the commuters, the road users and the hapless public will have to learn to live with the status quo for an indefinite time even in the future.
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