Taking rickshaws off increased traffic jam
MANY eyebrows will surely be raised on reading the title. Let's try to work out the sums. It's reported that in 1995, there were about 35,000 private cars and jeeps. By 2009, that number exploded to a massive 200,000, and still more are being added every month. Why? Most people, riding the additional 165,000 cars and jeeps, were riding rickshaws earlier. When the roads they had to pass through became off-limits to rickshaws, these people had no other option than to buy cars, even if that needed selling property or taking loans. Policymakers thought that taking rickshaws off the road would give the limited number of people riding cars the freedom to roam about unobstructed. They could not realise that so many had the capacity to buy cars.
Most of the time now, one car carries one passenger and occupies a certain road space almost all day. In the current reality of Dhaka, this is because even when it is parked, whether at an office or at a shopping area, it will most probably occupy road space. On the other hand, a rickshaw, occupying about one-third the road space, will carry more than 20 passengers (assuming it carries one passenger at a time) in the same time. Since a car would carry a person twice, from home to office and back, or from home to the market and back, the effective number of people that a rickshaw would serve, calculated on a equal setting, would be about 10 per working day. That means about 20,000 rickshaws could have carried the above mentioned 200,000 car passengers. Now think of the road space utilised; this equals that of about 7,000 cars (one third of 20,000). So, taking private cars off the road will clear the traffic jam instantly!
We frequently talk about the dearth of road space in Dhaka, and our policymakers use it as an excuse for doing nothing right now. A capable leader achieves an improvement under existing situations through innovations, and then thinks of the future. Any hired vehicle uses road space much more efficiently than does a private car. While our traffic policies should have tried to shift car passengers to buses, taxis, autorickshaws and rickshaws, we did the opposite. We tried to move passengers from the more road-efficient rickshaws to buses, which evidently backfired.
The sad part is that most people who write about Dhaka transport in newspapers, or who make the policies, themselves ride cars, and their self-interest comes up subconsciously and blocks their ability to think with reason. To sustain Dhaka, we have to provide transport to its 15 million people. Just thinking of a small percentage and then burying one's head in the sand will only make Dhaka unliveable.
I have a suggestion. Why not try an experiment just for two weeks and see the results? Put a ban on all private cars and jeeps (including the government ones carrying ministers and officers -- excluding only the convoy of the president and the prime minister) from Sunday to Thursday, between 7am and 7pm! What will be needed is a well-publicised announcement beforehand so that rickshaws can be available on the roads that were off limits to them thus far. I am sure you can reach your destination much earlier; the air will be much less polluted, and the country will save a large amount of scarce fuel.
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