Dealing with Dhaka's parking menace

The sight of cars,parked chaotically on the streets of Dhaka city, has become an everyday affair. Lack of parking areas has compelled people to park illegally on the roads. This is congesting the roads, intensifying gridlocks and causing nuisance to pedestrians and commuters. Street vendors occupying pavements further reduce the space on the roads in busy areas like Motijheel. Resultantly, we have to lose hundreds of working hours due to regular traffic gridlock. And it is important that the situation should not be allowed to continue like this as it is a sheer wastage of time and money. We must find all possible ways to bring down traffic congestion to a tolerable limit.And for this, we must increase the number of authorised parking spaces in the city.
Parking on streets remains largely unmanaged as people park vehicles such as cars, covered-vans, rickshaw-vans, rickshaws and auto-rickshaws in any location or direction they want due to lack of awareness and enforcement of law. Hundreds of new cars are joining Dhaka's busy traffic every day. Since we have not yet been able to introduce a comfortable public transport service, it can be expected that the number of cars will only rise in the city in the future. Considering this, the authorities concerned must wake up now, and take a comprehensive plan for tackling this menace. If needed, we have to build multi-storeyed parking lots across the city.

Fariha Tabassum Piya,
Student of Department of Management,
University of Dhaka, Dhaka,
f.tabassum36@gmail.com