The Price of Traffic
Dhaka city’s biggest problem is traffic. At least, that is what I think. The frustration of being stuck in one place really does not set us off to a good day. Millions of Dhakaites fear the idea of heading out of their houses every single day to take hours just to traverse one kilometer.
The traffic does not just cost us our days, it costs us real money! It only keeps getting worse, we lost takas more than 200 billion on a single road alone! That is around 28 million dollars just for the airport-postgola road. That is insane for a country that could barely afford to accommodate their middle class. The price was calculated courtesy of the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development by making estimates of the amount of fuel wasted while stuck in traffic and the lost potential man hours.
This is a real problem that begs for a solution, how can we stop this? Once again, it is up to the people.
Our government tries the best it can, which frankly might not be much. They are to blame for the lack of proper infrastructure and city planning that made Dhaka such a cluttered labyrinth of misguided wheels. But we are to blame at how we guide the wheels in the first place.
In the end, we are the ones driving the cars and calling the rickshaws. When I mean we, I don’t mean the privileged who are able to read tumblr posts. But also the drivers who are the backbone of our transportation ecosystem. If education is the solution to our problems. Then we should focus on driving as an education just as much as we value literacy as an education.
Stricter rules should be imposed for breaking traffic laws. Which are never imposed to anyone who crossed a red line or stayed in between lanes.
People in general should be more vocal about the situations of our roads to the government. It’s not the broken chunks of bricks that are the problem. It is the lack of the visibility of the lanes. The poorly planned traffic stops and most of all, the construction sites that treat the road as part of private property.
The streets of Dhaka, in spite of it’s claustrophobic inducing demeanor, represents freedom in the hearts of us Dhakaites. We feel more open on the streets than anywhere else in this city gridlocked with concrete towers and... more concrete towers. It should be our job first to make that symbol of freedom stronger and reciprocate that symbol to the people who can actually make a change. Which in the end, becomes all of us.
