Short fly-over to reduce traffic jams
Wednesday, 15 August 2007
Abul Ehsan
ON having lived in Dhaka for decades, this city has become my New York. I feel the magnetic attraction of our national capital -- the capital of my heart -- wherever I go, whichever city in the east or the west I visit. I feel distressed whenever I find the city in distress. But Dhaka is being increasingly distressed with its unplanned growth, sewer mismanagement, inadequate water supply and traffic chaos, which put more and more weight on my heart. Surely, the same thing is happening to many of our people who know how decay can take hold on a city. Not far from Dhaka is located our ancient capital at Sonargaon. It's an abandoned city where buildings are relics -- wreckages of what they once were, inhospitable now for modern living.
While I move on in our Dhaka city, I find some roads are clogged with long queues of stranded transports, caught up in massive traffic jams. I wreck my brain thinking to figure out what benefits we have actually derived from the multi-million taka project for improvement of Dhaka's road transport system, executed with a lot of road-shows by the immediate past alliance government. Old traffic islands were dismantled and new ones in new shapes were created in many places. The demolition and rebuilding efforts at the busy Shahbag intersection raised a lot of dust, sustained for months and overtaxed busy commuters' fragile patience. Those works are now complete. But commuters still find themselves stranded in long queues in traffic jams on all sides of that intersection as if those rebuilding activities were meant for draining money out.
I am neither a builder nor a city planner. My meagre common sense says, short fly-overs at major intersections, like the demolished Hatirpool, which once connected Paribag with Hatirpool Bazar, Central Road and Elephant Road and allowed the trains to and from the old Fulbari Railway Station to run through beneath it, would suffice to greatly ease traffic jams in this city. Free movement of transports of one road over a short fly-over and those of the other road beneath it may then even draw transports of adjacent roads for plying along reducing the possibility of traffic jams.
ON having lived in Dhaka for decades, this city has become my New York. I feel the magnetic attraction of our national capital -- the capital of my heart -- wherever I go, whichever city in the east or the west I visit. I feel distressed whenever I find the city in distress. But Dhaka is being increasingly distressed with its unplanned growth, sewer mismanagement, inadequate water supply and traffic chaos, which put more and more weight on my heart. Surely, the same thing is happening to many of our people who know how decay can take hold on a city. Not far from Dhaka is located our ancient capital at Sonargaon. It's an abandoned city where buildings are relics -- wreckages of what they once were, inhospitable now for modern living.
While I move on in our Dhaka city, I find some roads are clogged with long queues of stranded transports, caught up in massive traffic jams. I wreck my brain thinking to figure out what benefits we have actually derived from the multi-million taka project for improvement of Dhaka's road transport system, executed with a lot of road-shows by the immediate past alliance government. Old traffic islands were dismantled and new ones in new shapes were created in many places. The demolition and rebuilding efforts at the busy Shahbag intersection raised a lot of dust, sustained for months and overtaxed busy commuters' fragile patience. Those works are now complete. But commuters still find themselves stranded in long queues in traffic jams on all sides of that intersection as if those rebuilding activities were meant for draining money out.
I am neither a builder nor a city planner. My meagre common sense says, short fly-overs at major intersections, like the demolished Hatirpool, which once connected Paribag with Hatirpool Bazar, Central Road and Elephant Road and allowed the trains to and from the old Fulbari Railway Station to run through beneath it, would suffice to greatly ease traffic jams in this city. Free movement of transports of one road over a short fly-over and those of the other road beneath it may then even draw transports of adjacent roads for plying along reducing the possibility of traffic jams.