A pro-people transport plan for Dhaka

A pro-people transport plan for Dhaka

 Day by day the number of private cars increases in Dhaka City. This is fuelled by the fact that the private cars have been given priority in transport planning. More private cars, however, means more pollution, both noise and air. Not only does a car dependent transport system hurt the environment; it also uses up a lot of fuel, making our economy heavily fuel dependent. 

Transport planning that focuses on private cars benefit only a tiny portion of the population while making it harder for the majority to get around. If the current transport plan is implemented about 80% of the population will be neglected. For the 80% of the population that will be left out of the current transport plan one would need to develop pedestrian, fuel-free transport, and public transport infrastructure. For these we need to combine city planning with transport planning. Neighborhoods should contain everything needed for daily life such as, schools, jobs, shops, hospitals and entertainment. This would reduce the number of long trips between neighborhoods and lessen the volume of traffic on the roads.

 The short trips that would be needed within the neighborhoods walking and cycle rickshaws should suffice and if the infrastructure is improved it would increase speed and safety. For long distance travel out public transport must be developed. It is very necessary to control the number of private cars in order to create a better transport system as well as creating a more livable city. 

The Strategic Transport Plan (STP) for Dhaka must take pedestrians, fuel- free transport, inclusive neighborhoods and public transport into consideration in order to create a just transport system for all. The current transport plan encompassing the next 20 years, that is about to be approved, needs to be revised taking some of the before mentioned problems into consideration. The proposed STP for· Dhaka, if implemented, would only increase travel time and transport costs, pollution and fuel dependency, infrastructure and maintenance costs. The STP proposes 11 options to solve the current and future transport problems in Dhaka. The sixth option was chosen. This option includes constructing a metro rail system, a bypass, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). The question is why the option ranking sixth was chosen, while the first five were rejected. If one is not to follow the outcome of a detailed evaluation, but rather to introduce new terms on which the decision was supposedly made, then what is the point of a detailed evaluation in the first place? Further questions arise.

 A decision had previously been made to approve a 6,000 crore Metro rail project. Now a second decision has been made to approve a 23,000 crore Metro rail project. Why the two projects? And why such large expenditures for Metro when it is anticipated that relatively few passengers will use it? While public transit is undoubtedly important, a surface system would cost about 100 times less per kilometer, allowing for both lower cost and a far more extensive system. Further, if pedestrians are, as STP claims, to be given priority, why is there almost no expenditure and no plans for improving the situation for pedestrians-without whom, in any case, a Metro rail cannot function, as people must be able to reach the Metro stops in the first place. Research shows that if we invest in more roads all the problems associated with them, pollution, noise, fuel dependency, and traffic congestion will only increase. In proposal number 6, 3 elevated road ways are to be built at a cost of 614 million US dollars, an increased expenditure of 64% over option 1.

 We spend 64% more and get only more problems with traffic congestion and the environment. All 11 STP options claim to put pedestrians first but they only allocate 0.24% of the budget to pedestrian facilities. This is a tiny amount of money for a transport mode that is supposedly to get special consideration. The STP also claims that a waterway would be an environmentally friendly way to transport goods around Dhaka, but they only budget 1.11 % towards the building of such a waterway. Similarly 34% of trips in Dhaka are made by fuel-free transport but they only budget 0.44% to building up this transport mode. STP praises pedestrians, waterways and fuel-free transport as great modes of transport, yet allocates them next to nothing in all of their proposals. 

Their importance should be reflected in the amount of money allocated but sadly it is not. The Bangladesh Railway should play a major role in the transport sector of Dhaka. Its ability to move large numbers of people cheaply and fuel efficiently is a major plus to any transport plan. The STP proposal 6, suggest moving the main railway station, Karmalapur, to the outskirts of Dhaka City. This would only increase the traffic problems in Dhaka City because instead of taking the train all the way to the heart of the city, the many train passengers coming to Dhaka from other cities, would have to take road transport from the outskirts into the heart of the city. 

The road transport would increase the pollution in Dhaka City as well as the travel costs of the passengers. In a report of the Dhaka Urban Transport Project (DUTP) showed that a rickshaw-ban on Mirpur Road decreased public transport movement along the road by 26%. Yet they claim that they banned rickshaws in order to increase the mobility of public transport. After the implementation of the DUTP, the economy of the Mirpur Road corridor lost 700 million Taka per year due to wasted time sitting in traffic. This figure does not include the money spent on wasted fuel a or the environmental costs of burning so much fuel, which would be another 1.5 billion Taka. Before the STP proposal gets approved, we request the government to take steps to implement demand management and mixed use neighbourhoods. Also we request that the transport planning is not focused on cars but rather people. We would like to reiterate that Dhaka City should develop pedestrian, rickshaw, bicycle and public transport infrastructure. We also hope that facilities are created outside of Dhaka to alleviate the burden placed on the Dhaka City transportation system by people traveling to Dhaka for health care, education etc.