Editorial
Parking disorder taken to another level!
This atrocious business must stop
While we have been vociferously clamouring for a rapid increase in parking spaces within the structures of shopping malls, high-rise apartment buildings and business houses, if necessary, to be supplemented by high-rise parking lots, we are greatly perturbed by reports of reckless bus parking along roads on a regular, and disquietingly, authorised basis.
Although we needn't be surprised by it, because the malignant traffic-cum-parking mismanagement was bound to show up with an outgrowth spilling on to any open spaces, road stretches, howsoever constricted these themselves are. The very sight of hundreds of buses parked on and operating from the roads adjacent to Fulbaria and Joykali Mandir terminals as depicted in the front page photograph of this paper yesterday bore testimony to the horrendous reality.
The ungainly picture, a pain in the eye that it is, is but a manifestation of a much deeper malaise. Whereas it should have been the job of Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) to have built up parking lots for these buses, it is, in a brazen faced neglect of its obligations allowing the vehicles to be stranded on the busy thoroughfares in exchange for tolls running into thousands of Taka per day.
What the citizens particularly feel hard done by is the fact that because of the spin-off from the corrupt practice and being on a diet of easy cash, the DCC is effectively de-motivated from having parking lots to the terminals at all. They could have easily put up and run such parking facilities on a commercial basis charging fees from users.
It is academic, even diversionary at this stage to be talking about moving the Syedabad bus terminal away to the outskirts, what is important in the immediate term to get answers to the two very pertinent questions we would like to put to the LGRD ministry: who has authorised the DCC to allow parking of the buses in the Fulbaria area? Has the ministry asked the DCC to process a project for a parking lot?
At the same time, we believe, the DMP, or the home ministry, for that matter, has a role here to move the government for a built-up parking space near the terminals.
Let's have separate parking arrangements for the city buses, to begin with.
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