A move has been taken to develop a financial model for enabling profit sharing among bus operators to run city buses on six routes planned under a uniform bus company, officials said.
The Dhaka Transport Coordination Authority (DTCA) has already formulated a technical project to appoint an international consultant for developing the model, they added.
However sources said the move taken by DTCA is duplication of its work done in 2013 which recommended introducing company-based bus service.
As the authority failed to execute the plan mainly due to lack of capacity and non-cooperation from the bus operators, they need to take a fresh move after more than six years.
"Additional Tk 245 million will now be needed for carrying out the study again and preparing design concept etc," said one of them.
With financial assistance from the World Bank in 2013, DTCA had conducted the study under a project 'Dhaka Bus Network and Regulatory Implementation Study and Design Work', recommending reducing routes to 72 from then 150 by 2020.
DTCA officials, however, said the previous study was done to guide more on policy level but the latest one will recommend the DTCA use all means to execute the bus route rationalisation, also known as bus route franchise (BRF).
The previous study did not have any model to share profits by bus owners whose number is unspecified.
DTCA Traffic Engineer Anisur Rahman said the latest move is a follow-up to the previous study project as the city has now more than 300 routes. The number of routes was only 150 during the time of WB-funded study.
The government has been trying to introduce the BRF under its 20-year transport plan, the strategic transport plan (STP), in support of the mass transit system which will help transfer hundreds of thousands of passengers from metro rail stations to different destinations.
This restructuring of bus service is supposed to accommodate existing bus services with mass-transit system-BRT and MRT, the two most important components to ease traffic gridlock on a long-term basis.
As many as 3,000 owners and workers were against the move as they were unable to compromise with their profits.
However, former mayor of Dhaka North City Corporation Annisul Huq was able to moot the new idea for development in 2017 by pressing bus operators to sit and agreed them to run six colour-coded buses on 22 routes under six companies.
After his death, a special committee headed by Mayor Sayeed Khokon was formed on bus route franchise at Nagar Bhaban in September 2018. The committee has so far held 11 meetings and formulated a time-bound plan to implement the BRF.
The decision to appoint international consultant for developing business model was taken in its seventh meeting.
DTCA Executive Director Khandaker Rakibuddin Rahman said with the recommendation of the committee, a fresh move was taken to appoint the consultant under a technical project.
He said the Planning Commission has already approved the project.
The WB-funded study found that the length of bus routes varies from 0.5 kilometres to 66 kms. Sixty-five per cent of those routes have length between 10kms and 15 kms but only five out of 152 routes run in east-west direction.
It also found that buses waited for around 10 minutes at each crossroads-Jatrabari, Bijoy Sarani, Gabtoli, Saat Rasta, Tongi zero point, Bangabhaban, Ittefaq crossing and so.
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