The insufferable traffic jams
A short-term action plan suggested
Wasting three to four of our daily working hours on the street, if not more, while commuting to and from places is the sordid tale of our paralytic life in Dhaka city. With valuable man hours lost, absenteeism growing, output shrinking, incomes and opportunities lost, sickening trauma of endless waiting telling upon mental and physical health, there is no end to the adverse effects of unabated traffic congestion. The land area of the city being limited and the road network more so, the intensity of the commutation snarls is driven home in the most poignant manner.
The traffic situation is so bristling that it cries out for immediate relief. Let the long and medium term plans take their own turns, what we direly need at the moment is to concentrate on a short term action plan that after an accurate diagnosis of the immediate problems seeks to redress them.
It is learnt on the authority of the people who know (but did nothing about it!) that about one lakh jalopies of motor vehicles which had disappeared from the streets after the promulgation of Emergency are back on the street occupying the already critically crowded road spaces. Secondly, as against 87,000 licensed rickshaws, five lakh are plying in the city. The longer tailbacks in the city in the recent times are easily explicable in terms of such deplorable developments.
The question is: how could the dilapidated vehicles make their reappearance without the connivance of the police or BRTA? Traffic sergeants have been asked to impound road unworthy transports with an incentive given to them but the pertinent question is: why a blind eye was turned to their reappearance in the first place? Do we keep or have the statistics for such vehicles? What are the criteria followed? The reason why we ask the barrage of questions is to address the gaps in the supervision with an immediate effect. The traffic authorities should order the dilapidated vehicles out of the street and follow up with compliance measures. BRTA, for its part, should refrain from issuing fitness certificates to such vehicles about which generally it has earned quite a notoriety.
The second place where we must press the button is to require of the Dhaka City Corporation to adhere to a realistic limit being put on the number of rickshaws to ply in the city. Surely, five lakh is far too high a number to be had. The rickshaws need phasing out with concrete action taken for alternative employment of those who ply them having being driven by unemployment in the rural areas.
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