Flyovers have become part of our daily life not only in the city but elsewhere in the country thanks to our spree for infrastructural development over the past decades.
We have suffered immensely while the construction works were going on, leading to serious traffic unprecedented to the city dwellers. We had patience and our decision makers had perseverance and finally we now see a good number of flyovers spiraling in busy city centres and entry points.
The idea of flyovers is to provide passage over an obstacle without blocking the path below. This could be a road, highway, or railway. They are colossal affairs involving heavy equipment. While the construction goes on, it's a big challenge to allow a traffic stream without choking.
Some of the benefits of flyovers such as diverting traffic, reducing traffic jams, and allowing passage over roads without blocking the path below are very evident, which all of us are quite happy about.
But the glamourous flyovers have also caused some irreversible problems to the pedestrians. They have turned the simple act of crossing the road into a hazardous job at places. While the flyovers provide motorists with hassle-free rides, they have totally ignored pedestrian safety.
Flyovers, underpasses, and one-ways have squeezed pedestrians out of the roads. Such huge infrastructure projects either gobble up footpaths or shrink them so much that they are practically useless. At several points in the city, pedestrians are forced to wait endlessly for road crossing.
Pedestrians in Dhaka are the most neglected lot who must skip over dislodged pavements, skirt around vegetable vendors, squeeze past electrical poles and jaywalk between vehicles.
Walking in the city is nothing short of a nightmare. Accidents are common as a result of apathy of the city authorities - leading to a lack of unusable footpath and pedestrian crossings.
When it comes to flyovers, a good number of pedestrians and cyclists use them even though they are not allowed to. This is because the authorities have not provided for pedestrian movement while planning them.
Some experts in the field of traffic management and road safety are staunchly against the construction of flyovers as a relief and solution to traffic congestion, viewing them as an “irreparable damage.” They argue that globally, flyover-centric treatment of traffic congestion is not effective in urban areas.
They opine that flyovers have been implemented in the heart of the city to ease traffic clogging without consultation with experts, and most if not all of those have now turned out to be ineffective.
They emphasize the enhancement of transport capacity instead, by replacing the existing minibuses and microbuses with buses and double-decker ones immediately to ease the traffic pressure and ensure better use of roads. They claim this has been proved very effective in many cities like London, Hong Kong, and Moscow.
Although flyovers have been built in the capital to give its residents a sigh of relief from the curse of traffic congestion, their exit points have now turned out to be notorious points of traffic chaos. City residents experience severe traffic jams at the exit points (down ramps) of all the flyovers in the capital daily, especially during rush hour in the morning and evening.
It is assumed that the landing points of flyovers will remain chaotic unless the number of public transports increase and Metro Rail and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects are implemented in full scale.
Regarding safety on the flyovers, our public is not notified that these are not meant for pedestrian walking, cycle riding, rickshaws, etc. We need such notices prominently placed at the entry points of flyovers. This can also appear as TV ads to promote public awareness on such vital safety aspects.
There has to be some means of enforcement by putting some police personnel at the entry point of flyovers. One would be taken by surprise that even in one-way flyovers, there are vehicles or motorbikes coming from the opposite direction.
There are buses stopping at the entry points, thus blocking ways for others to take in passengers and letting someone down. This practice must be stopped, and a penalty imposed on defaulters.
I think we are paying enough in the form of toll to engage traffic police in sufficient numbers - at least on critical flyovers. If our police department is understaffed or is engaged in other priority jobs, recruiting and training local unemployed youth for this purpose is also an option. Why don't our city corporations have their own police personnel to perform such jobs?
It is no surprise that at early hours in the morning or at night, we come across people having leisurely walks with a motorbike parked on the flyover without at all realizing that it is hazardous and could lead to a fatal accident. This is a common scene on the newly constructed Kalshi flyover connecting Mirpur to the airport road.
There is nobody to educate, check, and desist them from such dangerous acts. One early morning a few months back, I found a severed body of an ill-fated young cyclist lying still on the flyover with his mangled bicycle smashed a few metres away. Maybe he was riding from the opposite direction and crashed head on against a rushing car.
The government has done a wonderful job by presenting such a marvel to ease the fate of the commuters but can the concerned authorities really afford to turn a deaf ear to such irregularities?
Brig Gen Qazi Abidus Samad, ndc, psc (Retd) is a freelance contributor