Must be an Eye-opener for the PM
When our Prime Minister with her police escort has to break the law to avoid being stuck in traffic, then one can imagine the plight of the common people. As The Daily Star front-page photograph snapped by staffer Enamul Huq with a split-second wit depicted, PM's motorcade arcked into the wrong side of the thoroughfare after failing to make its way through the jampacked 'right side' of it.
So horrendous was the traffic congestion ahead of the prime ministerial paraphernalia that it had to break the rule, both of which - the jam and the departure from normal practice - were seen by the Prime Minister with her own eyes. As she rode along the avenue she must have also seen some of the backlash forming into traffic thickets at road-crossings while for the most part the ripple effects lasted well beyond her journey-time.
If seeing is believing, then she must have absorbed some of the dangerous slide the urban traffic situation has taken. That VIP road being rickshaw-free, the problem goes deeper than a quick-fixer of a theory that the rickshaws are the spoilers.
We have strained our vocal chords a few times over along with the rest of the print media to point out that the increasingly snarling metropolitan traffic that also belches out the worst pollutants in the environmental book, needs immediate government intervention to save manhours and the civic health from utter ruination. Nobody seems to care. Whatever sign of recognition of the immensity of the problem one occasionally sees is mostly by way of displaying knowledge of the subject with a dash of anecdotal exchanges much the same way that victims of the situation i.e., the ordinary people usually do. Resolutions intermittently pop up from coordination meetings and a minister or two were heard setting target dates to stamp out traffic congestion and pollution but the resolves applied more in their breach. Most plans are long term-bound but that the problem's bristly aspect is remediable in the short term is routinely lost sight of.
The Sunday incident better not be explained away as an one-off aberration linked to the Eid-eve congestion. That is the surest way to 'taking things in the stride.' True, there is no trifling, with the free mobility of the chief executive of the state, but when this contrasts starkly with the avoidable inconvenience of the citizens she is mandated to serve then obviously it is the latter that demands her urgent personal initiative. From her own experience the PM must have realised last Sunday that the city traffic has crossed all limits of tolerance. She, we hope, will do something about it now that she was forced to break the law to avoid the traffic jam.
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