Terrible impact of tailback

People living in the capital of this country have long considered themselves privileged. But this perception is changing fast. Dhaka city hosts the country's administrative hub, the best of educational institutions and healthcare facilities. Opportunities for employment, business and otherwise money-making are greater here than anywhere in the country. Even illiterate villagers with no skill at all can pull rickshaws on receiving a nominal training. Those men who cannot pull rickshaws find employment in odd jobs. Then there is a demand for girls and women migrating from villages as labour in garments factories or residences of middle and upper classes.
Clearly, the pulling force of the city is very strong. But here is an urban sprawl that has not expanded under a well-orchestrated plan. Its infrastructure and services are under tremendous stress and strain because of heavy concentration of population. A city life is preferable because life is fast and smooth. People must make the best use of their time at home, on way to educational institutions, hospitals, offices, factories, business houses and all other establishments.
Instead, here city life is becoming more and more miserable with every passing day. The misery is nowhere more pronounced than on the city roads. People are forced to suffer agonies of getting stuck for hours together on account of long tailbacks everyday. A 15-20-minute bus ride now routinely becomes an affair of two to three hours. This means that a commuter has to endure the nightmarish experience for five to six hours on the road amid the belching gas and heat emitted by automobiles all around. This is further worsened by needlessly repeated honking by uncaring drivers.
A victim of daily doses of environmental and sound pollution, someone is more likely to have a nervous breakdown than not. Helplessness together with annoyance saps energy. Perhaps a person can recuperate if the experience is gone through occasionally, say, for a day or two a month. But when it is a daily experience, the impact is likely to be devastating. People are left with little energy to go about the normal business in offices, factories, other work places and centres of excellence in particular. People have to get out several hours before to be in time for a celebration or other social functions.
What in economic terms is man-hour loss cannot quite explain the psychological adverse impact. Even those who ride an air-conditioned car to attend office duty and get back home do not find the experience amusing when they have to spend hours together in traffic jam. Frayed temper at times compels people to break laws or traffic rules. Motor cycle riders drive on footpaths, buses, cars and jeeps run on the wrong side of the road risking terrible accidents. This is how the legal bar is lowered and over a period the situation goes beyond salvage.
The entire transportation system in the capital and its connectivity with the rest of the country are ill-conceived. Transportation business has been monopolised by quarters known for their dubious characters. A report recently carried in a contemporary highlighted how introduction of new public buses has been made a difficult proposition by the vested interest groups in the sector. Different bus companies pressed buses into service about 20 years ago. Those are now only fit to be dumped into junk yards. Ramshackle and ill-maintained, they are a potential cause for road accidents.
It is not a normal country nor a normal capital when the High Court has to issue a directive sua sponte for the traffic authority to take action against unfit vehicles and those with no permit. The malaise lies deeper. Here is more or less a mafia world created over the decades to lord over the transport sector. Following the drive launched against faulty vehicles, the traffic in the city road has become thinner but the logjam has not eased in the least.
Why? It is because of the poor traffic management and the perennial problem of the city's dearth of road space made more miserable by the transport arteries running north to south with no one directly dissecting it east to west. Even the Panthapsath and the Bijoy Sarani release their traffic to the same north-south road at different points. Only the flyover commissioned lately has been effective in carrying the burden from Mirpur and adjoining areas on its own without being troubled by the flow of traffic at mid-point within the main city.
The reality is that such a populous mega city cannot solely depend on bus as a public service. That the taxi service has become a total failure is because of the time consumed on account of tailback. The answer to the city's transportation problem is railway service -whether it is elevated expressway, circular rail or underground rail network. It is good news that the inaugural work for the first phase of the elevated expressway has gone underway.
The authorities have assured that the service could be made ready for the public in 2018. To be constructed by Japanese fund and technology, the project should not get delayed like the four-lane Dhaka-Chittagong one. The fund was ready for use a year before but it was the recipient country's inability to furnish the required formalities that stalled the project behind schedule. With the construction of the elevated expressway, the mobility of city people will get a new lease of life.             
[email protected]