Traffic Capital of The World

Traffic Capital  of The World

I am in a tiny steel  cage attached to a motorcycle, stuttering  through traffic in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In the last 10 minutes, we have moved forward maybe there feet, inch by inch, the driver wrenching  the wheel Left and right, wriggling deeper into the wedge between a delivery truck and a rickshaw in front of us.

Up ahead, the traffic is jammed so closed together  that pedestrians are climbing over pickup trucks and through empty rickshaws to cross the street. Two rows to my left is an ambulance, blue light spinning uselessly. This is the what the streets here look like from seven  o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night. If you are rich, your experience it from the back sit of the car. If you are poor, in a rickshaw, breathing  in the exhaust.

I am sit in the buck of a CNG, a three-wheeled motorcycle shaped like a slice of pie and covered scrap metal. I am here working on a human rights project, but whenever I ask people in Dhaka what they  think international  organizations should really be working on, they tell me about the traffic.

Alleviating traffic congestion is one of the major development challenges of our time. Half the world’s population already lives in cities, and the United Nations estimates that the population will rise to nearly 70 percent by 2050. Dhaka, the world’s densest and fastest growing city, in a case study in how this problem got so bad and why its so difficult to solve.

Dhaka’s infrastructure doesn’t match the scale of its population. Just 7 percent of the city is covered by roads, compared with around 25 percent of pairs and Vienna. Dhaka also suffers from the absence of a planned  road network. There are 650 major intersections, but only 60 traffic lights, many of which don’t work. That means the police force isn’t enforcing driving or parking rules; they are in the intersections, directing traffic.

The cost of Dhaka’s traffic congestion to estimated  at $3.8 billion a year, and that’s  just the  delays  and air pollution, not the less-tangible losses in quality of life. Paradoxically, the poor infrastructure is one of the reasons why the city is growing so fast. Without roads or trains to whisk them to suburbs,Dhaka resident have no choice but to crowed into the middle, setup slums between high-rises, and walk to work

Then there are the users of the roads. Besides pedestrians, the narrow lanes  are shared by bicycles, rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, CNGs, buses and cars. All this modes take up a different amount  of space have different top speed most people youtalk to in Bangladesh blame the traffic jams on the rickshaws. There are too many of them, they says, and they drive so slowly that they trap the cars, buses, and CNGs behind them. The government is under pressure to designate some lanes as car-only, to build wider roads and over presses, to take the slow traffic out from in front of the fast.

And this brings us to the third reasons why the traffic problem is so difficult to solve. All of this fixes sound easy and obvious, but they come at a cost. One and a half million people drive rickshaws for a living, plus another few hundred thou and own and repair them. Government  efforts to get people to get out of rickshaws and trains are going to attract huge opposition.

Even increasing bus capacity is more complicated it sounds. A 2009 world bank analysis found 60 separate bus companies in Dhaka. Since the bus companies compete with other, the drivers  have every  incentive to drive aggressively and take more passengers than the buses can hold. What’s more, the public transport isn’t all that public. Many of the bus companies are owned  or linked to political parties or powerful trade unions. Government efforts to unify or regularize the system would amount to a hostile takeover of all of these small companies.

The obvious solution is to separate the rickshaws from the cars, from the CNGs, give each of them lanes and lights according to their top speed, and crucially, make car divers pay the cost taking up more space on the roads. But that, politically speaking, is unrealistic. Car owners are the small part of the population, but they are the most influential. Every year, Dhaka adds an extra 37,000 cars to its already overcrowded  roads.

 Think about all this from a Bangladeshi politician’s point of view. Any attempt solve the traffic mess means annoying the poor, the middle class, and the rich all at once.

Thanks to the donors, in 2012, the government announced a $2.75 billion plain to build a metro rail system and a $45 million bus rapid-transit line from the airport. For residents of Dhaka, it will come as a relief.

Whenever I asked my Bangladeshi colleagues how long it would  take to get somewhere, they always gave to answer: “without traffic, maybe fifteen minutes. But with traffic?  Who knows?”