Sitting idle in excruciatingly long traffic queues, with nothing to do but watch hours fly and try to count the monetary losses everyday is a routine chore for a resident of Dhaka.
A recent survey conducted by the communications ministry says, every year people of Dhaka lose 3.2 million working hours sitting idle in traffic gridlocks which amounts to Tk200bn in monetary terms.
Abdullah Al Mamun, an engineer of the Roads and Highways Department (RHD), and Marufa Ismat, RHD’s chief economist on transport issues, recently conducted the survey and submitted the report.
Assuming that a vehicle stands still in heavy traffic for seven hours on an average from 8am to 8pm, the survey estimates that the annual loss amounts to the staggering Tk200bn figure.
According to another statistic of Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA), a total of 212,103 new vehicles hit the roads of the capital every year, of which around 21,000 gets registered.
The BRTA statistics also showed that among the newly registered vehicles, most are cars that are owned as private property.
Talking to the Dhaka Tribune, surveyor Abdullah Al Mamun said while a typical metropolitan city must ideally have at least 25% of its total area as roads, Dhaka have only about 8%.
Moreover, 68% of the roads in the capital are not wide enough for the easy movement of vehicles, he added.
In order to trickle down on the severe traffic congestion, the authorities concerned, starting in 2009, took a number of initiatives including changing the timings of schools and offices, enforcing lane system, automatic traffic signals, making usage of pedestrian over bridges mandatory, removing expired vehicles and keeping shopping malls in different areas closed on weekdays by rotation.
But all those initiatives had mostly gone in vain, city residents said.
According to a survey conducted by the Work for Better Bangladesh, a non-government organisation, merely 5% of the capital’s total population own all the private cars, for which the other 95% of people suffer on roads.
The survey also concluded that private cars occupy around 54.2% of the total area of the roads in Dhaka.
The communications ministry has also said numerous times in the past that the privately owned vehicles are the main reasons behind the capital’s traffic congestion.
Authorities have also identified in the past that the 20 level crossings as one other major reason for traffic congestion in the capital.
Official figures showed that a total of 72 trains run across the city every day, each of them keeping traffic paralysed for five minutes on an average, accumulating to an aggregate delay of six hours a day.
The project that the government took up for building traffic overpasses at all levels of crossing in the capital has been in a limbo.
The traffic situation gets particularly edgy before the major festivals like the two Eids and Puja. According to various surveys, around one million retail traders come to Dhaka before the festivals to buy goods from the wholesalers.
Talking to the Dhaka Tribune, Dr Sarwar Jahan, professor of urban planning of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), said 25% of Dhaka residents travel on foot, 40% on rickshaws, 28% on busses and only 3% on auto-rickshaws.
This distribution is one of the main reasons for paralysing the traffic because there is no proper public transportation system in place, he said.
The Buet professor lambasted the government’s urban planners saying they had been trying to plan Dhaka following Singapore and Thailand without understanding that Dhaka have completely different realities and hence require unique planning.
Dr Jahan suggested that the authorities must think about implementing metro rail and smooth and regular bus services for being able to get a grip on the ever worsening traffic situation.