As a city, Dhaka has more than its fair share of issues, but few issues are as relentless as the city's traffic. Our traffic issues go beyond the visible frustration of motorists and pedestrians, with a study last year concluding that our capital city loses eight million working hours, worth Tk140 crore, to traffic each day.
In fact, Dhaka has been deemed the fifth worst city in the world in Numbeo's Traffic Index by City 2023 rankings, right behind Nigeria's Lagos, San Jose in Costa Rica, Colombo in Sri Lanka, and Los Angeles in the US. While we certainly don't need rankings to tell us how much worse our traffic situation is getting year after year, it certainly puts things into perspective.
The roads and highways of Dhaka pose a very complex, logistical challenge as a variety of vehicles ply our roads -- from private cars, to buses, to rickshaws. While there are clear infrastructural deficiencies in our roads and highways, it is equally clear that our etiquette on the roads leaves a lot to be desired, as -- given the opportunity -- it seems that the way we behave on the streets is inherently negligent of the risks that we take when we, for example, go on the wrong side of the road, speed, overtake, and disregard any other general rule.
However, this can also easily be chalked up to the lack of enforcement when it comes to traffic laws, which is one of the root causes behind road accidents and related deaths and injuries.
Perhaps the biggest underlying issue behind Dhaka's monstrous levels of traffic is just how central the city is to our nation's economy -- the centralized nature of our economy puts a lot of pressure on the capital No matter how hard we try to fix our traffic problem through surveys, studies, and planning, in the long run, we simply must decentralize our facilities into other cities throughout the country.
It will be a gradual endeavour, but, ultimately, decentralization is our only exit from the tyranny of Dhaka traffic.