Editorial
Managing city's traffic woes
Urgent problems should get the priority for addressing
THE traffic muddle of the capital city has been going from bad to worse every passing day. Many of the attempts taken in the recent past to manage the mess, however, have failed to produce any result.
According Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA), some one hundred vehicles are pressed into the city's ever-swelling fleet of transports everyday. The chaos is exacerbated by old and unfit vehicles getting the certificate from the licensing authority and plying these clogged roads. And there is also the perennial problem of hogging of the footpaths by construction materials defying Building Construction Act of Rajuk. Add to this the ubiquitous hucksters and the habit of parking vehicles helter-skelter flouting traffic rules.
So, we have all these problems clamouring for attention all at a time. And to address those, we have also recommendations galore, though none of those could so far pass the test of implementation.
Officials of a number of agencies responsible for managing the city's traffic as well as some experts on the subject have put the blame for the failure to manage the city's traffic on the shortage of manpower, inadequate logistic support and lack of coordination. At the same time, some city dwellers held corruption in the departments concerned as one of the major roadblocks to the improvement of the city's traffic system.
It is against this backdrop, one needs to prioritise the efforts to deal with the city's traffic mess according to their relative urgencies. The systemic flaws in the form of corruption, inadequacies in the number of staff and equipment under various agencies may take time for their addressing. But what needs immediate attention is the growing number of motorised vehicles and pedal rickshaws, most of them unauthorised, vying for limited road space. The authorities concerned will have to put a limit on the number of vehicles, including that of rickshaws. The vehicles that are not road worthy should be ordered off the streets. Simultaneously, the authorities must have a policy to expand the scope of mass-transport service facilities in the city.
As there is no short-cut means to get over the city's traffic problem, the government has to take a phased approach to resolve it. So, it must resolve immediate issues first, before tackling the long-term ones.
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