Editorial
Road Dividers
The Dhaka City Corporation's biggish new project for planting trees on road dividers has nettled the DMP's traffic division. The traffic police can make a common cause with road users in demanding a scientific approach from the DCC to this undertaking in what appears to be a healthy improvement upon their usually recriminatory relationship. With the benefit of hindsight the DMP (Traffic) and vehicle operators are saying that the foliage and the commercial hoardings put across the tree-branches would block the view of drivers making the traffic quite inexorably accident-prone. The deeper roots of the trees could also tear apart the concrete soling with a crumbling effect on the medians (the two-strip oblong stretch in equal parts) or the straight single-strip dividers. The medians and dividers in big cities all over the world are invariably landscaped and greened, but seldom with leafy bowers and drooping branches that obstruct vision. On the contrary, it is either flat lattice-work, plot of grass, flower-bed or narrow vertically rising plants kept the trimmer by periodic prunings. All that the DCC needs for nipping this controversy in the bud is to replace the purely engineering point of view by a horticulturist's expert angle of vision. Meanwhile, let there be authentic clarification on the subject of divider plantation from the Mayor's office.
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