How Dhakaiites can save Tk 100cr a day

Many residents in Dhaka really look forward to the Eid holidays when they get a brief respite from the maddening traffic and smog. Dhaka is at its best during the long holidays.Photo: STAR

In this age that calls for ever-increasing productivity, we the Dhakaiites are missing out on a grand opportunity. Every single day 15 million of us in this fast-growing metropolis are to twiddle our thumbs for up to four hours a day, as we travel back and forth between our workplace and home. The traffic jams are so commonplace and frequent that people here have resigned to accepting this most unbecoming of cityscapes -- a city gridlocked in never-ending traffic jams.
My friends from abroad tell me "oh, don't feel bad, Bangkok used to be far worse ten years back". That does not change the fact that we are definitely ten years behind when it comes to managing inner city traffic. Our city masters and government planners are napping, sometimes in the same traffic or in their offices and homes paid for with taxes from our hard-earned money. And we are expending our sweat for nothing as we wait out there in the sun and the rain to catch a bus, rickshaw or taxi or better yet, wait inside our transports in bumper- to-bumper traffic haltingly crawling along the pitch-dark roads of Dhaka with only the jerks of potholes to break the monotony of lethargy.
That our roads are inadequate, city population and number of vehicles are rising and people's mobility are also rising as incomes rise, are all well-known facts that have not been lost on our city planners as long as we care to remember. Then how come adequate steps and measures have not been taken progressively to keep pace with the trends?
Of course the city planners and government functionaries will fault the lack of funds and know-how for their lack of sufficient initiatives in this regard. Go to any after-work (sometimes even 'at-work') get-togethers over a cup of tea, coffee or whatever drink the Dhakaiites fancy these days, you will find plenty of sure-fire solutions to our traffic problem. Some of them are of course hilarious enough to be included in the book on 'Dhakaiite jokes' but most are truly tested and proven common-sense approaches to solving any modern city traffic situations. So the excuse of lack of know-how does not stand up to reason. That leaves the issue of funding such measures. With Dhakaiites paying the lion's share of the revenue collections of the government amounting to more than seventy thousand crore taka (Ten billion US dollars) annually, coming up a few thousand crore taka to solve the city's chronic traffic problem should be as easy as a song. Of course you must pitch the right song to the right audience. But with the World Bank, ADB and IDB of the world waiting in the wings to lend billions and our own ever-more-courageous entrepreneurs eager to pump in money in public-private-partnership initiatives, there cannot be dearth of funds either.
That leaves no excuses for the city gods, whoever they are, in shirking from their responsibility to remove the impediments and bottlenecks of vehicular traffic in and around the city of Dhaka. The present situation is simply unbearable. Sometimes when I feel guilty about not doing enough exercise I let my driver go home with the car in the afternoon as I venture out in the streets for a brisk walk along the crowded-littered-broken pavements. The journey on foot takes me about 50 minutes. But these days it takes twice as long to go the distance by car. The other day my cousin, who teaches at North South University, got home in Dhanmondi from Basundhara in four hours. That's right folks, f-o-u-r hours. You can fly to Singapore in less time than that. I figure on average the city-dwellers here lose two hours of productive time per day due to the crippling traffic situation. Out of the 15 million souls living in the city I reckon at least a third are working as professionals or daily wage earners that would put the number at 5 million. We have low-end wage earners who make 10 taka an hour to high-end professionals who make in excess of 2,000 taka an hour. Way may assume the average income per hour to be around taka 100. That computes to around Taka one hundred crore a day in lost productivity. Does it take any donor-funded consultants to let us know that we have to fix the traffic? It's easy to see in the math if not felt in the discomfort of sweating on city streets for endless time. As for me I really look forward to the Eid holidays when the likes of me get a brief respite from the maddening traffic and smog. Many of my friends get busy going abroad or away from the city during the holidays; bad move, Dhaka is at its best during the long holidays.
The author is the founder CEO of Technohaven Co Ltd and the current president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services. He can be reached at [email protected].