Around every Eid holiday, citizens of Dhaka who stay back get a brief glimpse into just how pleasant our roads and highways can be. However, a relatively unseen domino effect of the lack of traffic is just how drastically the quality of air improves in Dhaka.
Air pollution has long been one of our capital’s biggest issues since the city’s rapid urbanization gained momentum, but just how much of that is the result of the excessive levels of traffic on our roads on any given workday? Dhaka consistently tops the list of cities with the worst air quality in the world, but during the 3rd day of the Eid-ul-Azha holidays, the city’s air quality index score stood at 91, placing it at the rank of 11 -- a drastic placement away from the city’s usual ranking amongst the top three.
This is concerning, to say the least. While the economic and productivity ramifications of Dhaka’s traffic have been recorded and studied, the health implications are seldom given any attention.
We have always known that obviously problematic establishments such as brickfields are the biggest contributors to Dhaka’s air pollution levels, but the role of emissions from unfit vehicles -- especially human haulers, covered vans, and buses -- need to also be kept in mind. Not only are these old, antiquated vehicles poisoning the air, they are also directly endangering lives due to their faulty nature. The government needs to ramp up its measures towards checking the fitness levels of any given vehicle on the road.
We understand that eliminating traffic from a city as densely populated as Dhaka would not be easy. However, the government needs to understand that due to the centralized nature of our economy, the abject state of Dhaka is akin to a feedback loop of people coming in droves from other parts of the nation which have not undergone any significant development.
Bangladesh needs to get out of this loop, and the only way to do it is to decentralize.