A highway is meant to facilitate smooth intra-city transport.
However, with pervasive gridlocks and endless traffic on Bangladesh’s highways, travelling is anything but smooth.
Thanks to heavy industrial vehicles treating the highway as their own personal garage, it has become a sight too common to see queues of vehicles clogging up what should be a constantly moving traffic lane.
This continues despite the fact that the highway has been expanded to fix this very problem.
The root of the problem seems to be the various factories which have taken over the highway and have parked their trucks right in the middle of the highway.
Why has this been allowed to continue?
Reports suggest that law enforcement in the area are involved, taking bribes to allow such illegal parking.
If factory owners would like to park their trucks, they cannot use the roads and highways to do so, and the police should ensure that this remains the case.
Despite promises from factory owners to have their own truck stands, this has yet to be realised. It is not acceptable that big businesses that do so much for the economy of our country are culpable by not yet arranging for their own stands.
Highways are an integral part of the economy, as they bring people and businesses together. As such, it is crucial that regulations on the highway are strictly enforced, as they are in developed nations of the world.
In this regard, it is up to the authorities to not only liberate the highways from illegal parking, but to also revamp the infrastructure so that factory vehicles are not constantly interrupting the flow of traffic.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
