Traffic conditions in Dhaka are not getting any better. Many tell me conditions are worse; no one says that they are better.
As the city has grown in population and size, the number of vehicles has increased. The rapid economic growth of the past fifteen years has led to a rising demand for personal vehicles.
Travel speeds have dropped to the same level as walking. Crowded, dirty buses, surly bus staff, confusion, and dangerous driving habits have produced a burden of discomfort and time wasting that is staggering.
Expert fairy tales
The government in the past fifteen years has made a serious effort to improve transport conditions. A series of projects has emerged and billions of dollars are being spent to improve conditions.
Regrettably, the authorities have been misled by their consultants, the Japanese government, World Bank, and ADB.
All of these august persons and organizations have called for very expensive, high technology solutions to the traffic conditions.
I predict that these giant projects to improve traffic conditions will not work. That is, there will be no real improvement in the time and costs that Dhaka residents spend to get around.
The designed systems will work – up to a point. People will get on the cars and buses and go somewhere. The many users will eventually find how to navigate the shiny new facilities. But point to point travel times of actual destinations (not between stops on a project) will not improve very much.
The costs of travel on most routes will rise. The promoters of these giant projects will tell us that even greater investments are needed to achieve improvement.
I desperately hope that my assessment is wrong. Time will reveal the outcome.
Let's look at the key projects:
Dhaka Metro Rail
This project is a series of train lines largely at level, but some elevated, that will move people from a stop on the line to another stop.
The passenger has to get to the boarding stop and has to find transportation from the disembarking stop to his final destination.
How easily this will work, the total cost of a journey, impact of the chaos at the stations are all unknown. We do know that a similar project in Thailand took a decade to reach break-even.
Dhaka Elevated Expressway
This project has two possible clear improvements -- move trucks to and from the Chittagong highway to the Dhaka RMG factories faster and with less interference at the street level.
Second, this project has the capacity to operate a backbone bus system (travelling up and down the elevated expressway) linked to the regular buses that would be rather like the metro rail but with fewer stops.
This project had financing difficulties: The World Bank refused to participate; largely as they were is a protracted quarrel with the minister in charge of the project.
The ADB refused to participate as they had a stubborn project officer who wanted to use the railway and thought that his beliefs were superior to the Bangladesh government.
This has led to serious financing difficulties and a project whose implementation is years behind.
The second elevated expressway may go better, but if the first one is not finished both lose much of the promised benefits. One has to be pessimistic.
Bus Rapid Transit
After torturing the city for years, this project may be finally coming to completion. This project will cause far more misery than it will alleviate.
This project is the brain-child of the ADB. The cost of the project, if you include the delays it caused commuters over the last five years, is horrendous and will never be recovered.
This project runs south to the airport and then drops everyone on the street. A schoolchild would reject such an approach.
How could the ADB, a group of very intelligent men and women condone what a child could see was nonsense?
The World Bank intended to build an extension of the BRT through the main city. As the troubles with the northern part unfolded the southern part was scrapped.
The ADB also seemed keen to use the railway system as a commuter service. This idea keeps being pushed and now may actually emerge, entangled with the ones under construction.
The project as I understand it will delay the elevated expressway and ultimately may even result in it not being completed. This should lead to lots of international litigation.
The first and third projects will soon get underway. As they start their revenues will be far less than their operating costs, adding to the government deficit at a time when the Ministry of Finance is fighting to reduce the deficit.
Years of effort to improve traffic conditions in Dhaka have all failed. I believe no one ever really asked the question: What is the best approach to reduce the mounting costs and wasted time?
The belief that these facilities pass some kind of cost-benefit analysis is a myth. Experts that work on urban transport have devised very complex models, try to collect data to use them, and on the basis of this work purport to inform us of the benefits arising from the project, by moving people more rapidly from one location to another.
The problem with all of this is that it exists in the minds of the analysts. The models are not validated against reality. There is remarkably little common sense used.
To make things worse no systematic plan has been followed, so projects interfere with each other. Since there is a lot of money available, many departments want to get into this racket.
What is the present transport system?
Most people get around by three means: Walk, CNG, and buses. Using the bus, you try to get close to your destination and then walk or use a CNG.
This system works well except for the long delays caused by all the cars. The automobiles driven by government officials, rich Bangladeshis, business vehicles for business operations (delivery, site visits, meetings, etc) clog up the roads and cause traffic delays. Reach down with a magic wand and remove these cars and one finds that the buses and CNGs would get around much faster.
What we have is a system where 5% of the population cause inconvenience for the other 95%.
I do not think that all of the fancy systems under construction will help. What will happen is the delivery of large numbers of people at a stop who will turn to the CNGs, walking, and buses to reach their final destination.
As so many people are delivered by these high-speed trains the task of moving them to their final destination will be even more congested. Soon two of these facilities will start delivering people.
One facility, the BRT, will deliver large numbers of persons to the airport; chaos will follow as all these folks seek further transport. Further it will reduce the road space available for people not using the BRT and cause them to drive much more slowly.
The BRT will be expensive; onward transport will also be expensive as demand will go up from particular spots (e.g. the airport).
The metro rail will not be so bad but the effects will be the same.
These systems do nothing for the travel within the city for delivery, meetings, etc.
I do not think that the billions being invested in BRT, metro-rails, elevated expressways, underground trains, trains at level, etc will provide an effective system. The proponents of these systems have not really tried to understand how Dhaka citizens move around.
It is too late now but one could take a scientific approach. Finish the Metro-rail and BRT that are almost ready. Stop everything else temporarily. See how well these systems work.
On the basis of real data on use, convenience, and relative cost, we could then determine if any of these projects actually works in comparison to a well-organized bus system, which is really what we should have been focusing on all along and which is still indispensable as an adjunct to the high-tech solutions.