Finance minister on traffic congestion
Finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhit has recently come out with an interesting suggestion. He said that, in order to ease the traffic congestion of Dhaka, his government was thinking of either banning private cars from the city or making it compulsory for the private cars to carry 4-5 passengers. The idea seemed to me not only unrealistic but also unreasonable.
Take, for example, the case of a family of two left behind by their children living abroad. They need and therefore have a car. What will they do if they have to go out in their car? Will they ask for two or three persons from the street to accompany them to their destination?
Or, does the finance minister, or for that his government, expect this couple not to own a car and instead be prepared to hang on the door handles of a public bus and make their way to the destination? It might be too much to expect from the couple.
Then again, why is it that the finance minister is targeting only the private cars? What about the government vehicles? Why should they not be required to abide by the same restrictions? Why shouldn't ministers, secretaries and other top brass of the government organisations follow suit and fill in their cars to their full capacity while commuting in the city?
It is more than 60 years that the British government ended their colonial rule in this part of the world. It is strange that our rulers, never mind if they are elected by the people, still consider themselves as masters and the public as their servants and not vice versa. May God help the people of this country!
One shouldn't, however, be surprised at what our ministers want us to swallow. We are accustomed to it. It is not the first time that we have been entertained by our ministers' fantastic ideas. When there was scarcity of rice in the market, the then finance minister Saifur Rahman wanted us to eat cabbage instead of rice. The food adviser of the immediate past caretaker government of Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed advised us to eat less.
Now Finance Minister Muhit tells us to keep private cars off the streets because the government is unable to solve the problem of severe traffic congestion of the capital city. If you cannot, you must have your car full to its capacity. One wonders whether it is innocent humour or a cruel joke.
You have allowed car traders to import cars and sell them to the public. The public buys the cars after paying custom duty, VAT and what not. You have asked the car owner to convert it into CNG system in order to keep the environment free of carbon-pollution; he has done it at a huge cost. Now the energy minister wants to deny him CNG and the finance minister wants him to keep his vehicle off the street. How can we describe these intentions save as cruel jokes?
You do not have adequate number of CNG auto rickshaws. The few you have do not run on meter. You allow them to charge two to three times the rate fixed by the authority. You do not have a safe and easily available taxi cab service that could encourage a person to do away with owning a private car. You don't have an efficient city bus service or a metro rail that can serve the transport requirement of a middle class family. You do not have pavements worth the name alongside the streets that could have allowed the public to walk instead of depending on cycle rickshaws and paying through their nose.
You cannot make the public or the vehicle operators strictly follow the traffic rules because your traffic administration as well as law enforcing agencies are weak in manpower, lacking in training and with some of them engaged in corruption. You allow shopping malls to grow without ensuring adequate parking spaces. You do not build multistoried parking spaces in the busy areas of the city so that vehicles do not have to park here and there, causing traffic jam. You do not repair the roads or keep them free of unauthorised occupiers to ensure free flow of traffic. You do not ensure safe zebra crossings for the pedestrians to cross the roads.
Instead of addressing these issues first you want to transfer the liability of this huge mess onto the people's shoulders through a process of denial. That is not acceptable in a democratic society. The government will be well advised to get rid of such mentality of denying the public basic amenities and engage in more realistic and constructive exercises that will help overcome the multifarious problems of the city dwellers.
It is nearly two years that the present government has been in power. During this period, it may claim to have made considerable progress in many a sector. But, as I had mentioned in my previous columns, I still maintain that if the present government has miserably failed to show any sign of improvement in any sector it is the transport sector, the urban transport sector in particular, and this failure may prove very costly in the long run.
To overcome the ever-increasing traffic congestion of Dhaka city, construction of a subway rail or an elevated expressway should have started by this time. It didn't. It has been a long time since we heard about a circular river transport system around Dhaka. Nothing happened except a ceremonial inauguration of the project by the communication minister with two 30 person capacity motor vessels. We heard about 5-6 flyovers across the rail crossings of the city. No progress is in sight as yet. It is probably time for the prime minister herself to personally take stock of the situation and act quickly.
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