BRT still not on the horizon

Star Report
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Every morning and evening, it is the same pathetic scene. Thousands of middle and lower middle-class people wait in long queues for hours to catch a transport -- anything from a bus to a human hauler -- to either go to office or return home.

Over the years, this has become a part of our life in the capital due to the lack of any effective mass transport system -- essential for traffic movement for any city.

Dhaka has grown but the planners could not put in place either any Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) -- a system in which large, purpose-built buses ply on a designated lane of the road -- or metro rail. Traffic nightmare at the cities like Kolkata and Bangkok has been solved with such transport system.

In BRT system, the long bodied buses pass seamlessly on designated routes, quickly reducing the number of waiting passengers. The metro rail could transport 50,000 people an hour on any route. Both these could just cut Dhaka's traffic jam radically.

A BRT project was envisioned in the Strategic Transport Plan -- the bible for Dhaka's traffic system -- in 2008. A pre-feasibility study is now on. So it is anybody's guess when the system will be in place.

The metro rail system is also stuck in the route dispute with the air force, which thinks its security will be at stake. Nobody knows for how many years this will be stuck in such squabbling and indecision.

In absence of such measures, some adhoc tinkering is being done such as not allowing any more 'mini buses' and to introduce more large buses. But this is not going to have any visible impact.