Let’s say someone was told that good old Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, has made it to a list alongside Boston, Atlanta and Dubai. It is bound to trigger a "wonder what in the world could Dhaka have in common with these picturesque cities."
US-based lifestyle web portal Thrillist has recently talked to several renowned urban planners and come up with a list titled “The 9 Worst Designed Cities in the World,” and Dhaka has made it to that list as the worst of the lot.
The Thrillist article, published on April 17, shows that alongside other things, Dhaka shares a transportation system that is messy to say the least, with Boston, Atlanta and Missoula in the USA, Dubai in the UAE, Jakarta in Indonesia, Naypidaw in Myanmar, and Sao Paulo and Brasilia in Brazil.
It describes Dhaka as: “If there’s one city that symbolises what total planning and design failure look like, it’s Dhaka.”
Writer Gianni Jaccoma, a New York City native and a tech junkie, says the transportation system in Dhaka is “virtually non-existent,” with only 60 out of the city’s 650 major intersections having traffic lights.
He wondered how the millions of rickshaws, cars, motorcycles, buses and bycles share the same roads everyday and how “anyone gets anywhere in less than a lifetime.”
The article says the oozing population in Dhaka owes a lot to the poor commute, forcing many to “endure slum conditions within city limits just to be able to get to work.”
Jaccoma was similarly brutal on other entries on the list. Dubai appears to him as a “kind of a disjointed nightmare of skyscrapers,” the traffic in Atlanta “is legendarily awful,” and Brasilia is a “Frankenstein’s monster of a city."