Strategic intervention: Towards a traffic congestion free Dhaka

Transportation management is a regular process, traffic management should ideally improve every day based on the previous day’s data

What comes in mind when you think about Dhaka city traffic congestions? You are probably imagining extreme hot and dry weather, a long line of vehicles (multi-modal), no traffic signal, street hawkers selling water and cucumber, no trees to shade the pedestrian, it’s almost impossible to keep your eyes open in this high glare of sun and also no way to walk freely to the destination even if it is within 1 kilometre. You may be already exhausted to reach to your destination, so I wonder how can you be productive on your job? But if you own a car and have affordability to hire a driver for that, then you may be one of few luckiest people in Dhaka city. So let’s think about the majority of people who are the unlucky ones.
Few months ago, I was amazed by a reporting from a national television regarding a taxi driver who invented U-Loop to reduce freeway delay which can contribute to reduce traffic congestion in Dhaka city. After watching that documentary, I left with mixed feelings about our future as one of the senior Urban Transportation personnel affiliated with government who is graduated from the most reputed university quoted, “the idea is really great and we never ever thought about it while a taxi driver came up with this solution, this is really amazing”. From that day, I understand that, we really don’t have any transportation planner in our country, even if we have, (1) they are not engaging and (2) they don’t have any access to research facility to generate ideas to reduce traffic.
Over the past 15 years, there are a lot of publication, research and write up has been done in different media and I was wondering why we still couldn’t solve this issue. If you look at the discussions, articles and documentaries over the years you will find that the perspective to solve the problem has an inherited problem. For example, you will find people saying that (1) traffic police don’t do their duty, (2) there is a huge number of unregistered vehicles on the road, (3) the number of private cars are increasing and the roads are not sufficient, (4) rickshaw should not be in the main road, (5) no one follow or respect the law, (6) footpaths taken by street vendors, (7) poor traffic management or unplanned road network and many more. But believe me, none of these issues are real. Traffic police are doing their duty as far as they can, with the unregistered vehicle the number is still not un-manageable, private car will increase day by day as the economy grows therefore it is unavoidable, multi-modal transport can co-exist with proper management thus rickshaw ( most green vehicle) should not be abandoned, people respect the law but we don’t have any enforcement for that, most of the street vendors place their box in such space where we usually don’t walk on and finally we have to accept the road network that we currently have and do our work to utilise it most properly. So proper management can be a key to resolve this issue. What do you think? If none of the issues are not real then why can’t we solve the problem? The answer is, to solve these problems we have to go to its root and find out the real problem. Then that will be a strategic intervention towards a traffic free Dhaka city.
Most of child phycologist all around the world face one big question from the parents that their children has started asking question “why”. This means that when you want to know the basic of each issue then you should ask start asking question with “why”. For example if we now ask why we have traffic congestion in Dhaka city then we will have three very basic words to answer it and they are (1) people, (2) travel and (3) medium (road / vehicle). So if we start asking question like “why so many people”, “why they travel”, “why using vehicle” then we will start getting the root cause that can eliminate the problem by strategic intervention. Most of management professional would know about “fish bone diagram” and the way to minimize the problem in a project. In all solution, the crucial part is to identify the problem. If you are able to identify the problem with its root then most likely you can solve the problem.
The biggest drawbacks of being developing country are (1) we do not have data that can support our research and (2) we do not have access to resources that we need. May be these are few reasons why government of Bangladesh seek help from World Bank and other donor organisation and over the years these donor organisations help us to solve the problem. I want to refer to an article related to issue
“According to Nasrin Khandoker and Jonathan Rouse (2004), Congestion in Dhaka has been a growing problem during the last 15 years. In around 1992, the Govern­ment of Bangla­desh completed a study called 'The Greater Dhaka Metropolitan Area Integrated Trans­port Study', funded by the United Nations Development Program. The study recommended an immediate action plan and a long-term strategy to improve transport infrastructure in the Greater Metropolitan area of Dhaka. In response to this, the Government sought assistance from the World Bank to help fund the Dhaka Urban Transport Project (DUTP).”
So what happens to those projects? These are not the only projects to improve the transportation, there are many of them. Few months ago I had a chance to meet and discuss about a formal World Bank specialist in a seminar at Harvard University who was involved in the above mentioned project of Dhaka city. I was heartbroken by the views of that personnel about the corruption associated with Dhaka Urban Transport Project (DUTP). He was so frustrated that he never got into any WB project with Bangladesh. So at this point, we have to be very serious about this issue as it can’t be solved with resources or even foreign expertise.
We don’t know how many people use what type of vehicle every day. We don’t know the flow of people in a certain time of a day and we also don’t know the number of people living each ward where their daily destination are. All the data that we can have is out of assumptions. That’s the main problem. Our government took previous decisions under some expert assumptions not from real data. So what we can do to keep track of this and improve the network flow in a proper planned way? Because transportation management is not something that you can solve forever, it’s a live process, traffic management should improve every day based on previous day’s data. Anyhow, the only way I can see to tract the travel behaviour is to introduce a travel card for each of the traveller. This single idea of introducing travel card is a vast and interdisciplinary issue and it is never possible without a joint venture of public private partnership. I will discuss about this issue at the last segment of this article to draw an outline for the government to think about it. This travel card is one of the fish bone that also have many implications. For example, using the data from the travel card we can generate scheduling of public transport in proper way to optimize its performance throughout the city.
The reason for travel is the most dynamic data that can change every day but there cities get successful when they figure out the pattern of it. This is one of the most crucial part of intervention and it needs multiple dimension to work together. The best way to control peoples travel behaviour is to implement a proper land use plan. ‘Land-use plan’ means zoning the city and by ‘proper’ I meant zoning that encourage people to walk more rather than using vehicle. This is one of the most burning urban planning issue nowadays the world is dealing with. Anyway, I am not going to suggest something in this article that is not going to possible in near future. So let’s assume that we have a faulty land-use plan and unplanned growth in Dhaka city. What else we can do with this faulty situation that will minimize people’s un-necessary travel need. I can give one simple example, our government postal service is so unreliable and slow that we never think of sending a package within Dhaka city for office or domestic purpose. So we depend on sending those through a messenger or private courier service. In every developed country, postal service is always available within 5 minutes walking distance from each household. This can reduce a significant number of un-necessary traveller every day.
 Medium is the most visible part and it is mostly emphasised to address transportation issue all over the world. When we think of transportation problem, we most likely think of the medium of transport and its improvement. For example, if you have lived in Dhaka city for the past 10 years, you most likely to remember how many times, government evicted street vendors from Dhaka City Street.
Government also tried to make lane for different vehicle on road and yet they couldn’t succeed. The word ‘medium’ does not only mean Road and vehicle it refers to Street and transport. Many of us may do not know the difference between ‘street’ and ‘road’ but it is okay if you are not in this discipline. The problem arise when government employ those people to solve the issue and they do not know the difference. Anyway, what I wanted to say is, we should not concentrate on evacuating the street vendor from the street rather we should design a street incorporating them and involving them to maintain the pedestrian what we have designed. If you have migraine then you not going to cut your head, you should try to not have the migraine again by following some strategy. This should be the approach of the government by making a joint venture with private organisations.
We have talked about public–private joint venture several time in this article and I think now it’s time to elaborate a little bit with the example that World Bank that I mentioned earlier in this paper. I should not mention the World Bank personnel name as he was in conflict with our current government during his tenure with Dhaka city transport project. But after having discussion with him, I understand why government is continuously failing to improve Dhaka Bas Rapid Transit network. The public transport system of Dhaka city is not actually in government control and there are a lot of stakeholder involve that it cannot be solved without proper planning. The plan should be a win-win situation for every stakeholder otherwise the plan is never going to see the sunlight.
The good news is, we are not the only country who is facing this issue of poor plan, poor management and corruption. Many countries in this world has already overcome this issue by creating public-private partnership to make a plan for everyone to win. I believe we also can solve it by doing so.

The writer is an architect and urban designer E: [email protected]

 

Strategic intervention: Towards a traffic congestion free Dhaka

Transportation management is a regular process, traffic management should ideally improve every day based on the previous days data

What comes in mind when you think about Dhaka city traffic congestions? You are probably imagining extreme hot and dry weather, a long line of vehicles (multi-modal), no traffic signal, street hawkers selling water and cucumber, no trees to shade the pedestrian, its almost impossible to keep your eyes open in this high glare of sun and also no way to walk freely to the destination even if it is within 1 kilometre. You may be already exhausted to reach to your destination, so I wonder how can you be productive on your job? But if you own a car and have affordability to hire a driver for that, then you may be one of few luckiest people in Dhaka city. So lets think about the majority of people who are the unlucky ones. Few months ago, I was amazed by a reporting from a national television regarding a taxi driver who invented U-Loop to reduce freeway delay which can contribute to reduce traffic congestion in Dhaka city. After watching that documentary, I left with mixed feelings about our future as one of the senior Urban Transportation personnel affiliated with government who is graduated from the most reputed university quoted, the idea is really great and we never ever thought about it while a taxi driver came up with this solution, this is really amazing. From that day, I understand that, we really dont have any transportation planner in our country, even if we have, (1) they are not engaging and (2) they dont have any access to research facility to generate ideas to reduce traffic. Over the past 15 years, there are a lot of publication, research and write up has been done in different media and I was wondering why we still couldnt solve this issue. If you look at the discussions, articles and documentaries over the years you will find that the perspective to solve the problem has an inherited problem. For example, you will find people saying that (1) traffic police dont do their duty, (2) there is a huge number of unregistered vehicles on the road, (3) the number of private cars are increasing and the roads are not sufficient, (4) rickshaw should not be in the main road, (5) no one follow or respect the law, (6) footpaths taken by street vendors, (7) poor traffic management or unplanned road network and many more. But believe me, none of these issues are real. Traffic police are doing their duty as far as they can, with the unregistered vehicle the number is still not un-manageable, private car will increase day by day as the economy grows therefore it is unavoidable, multi-modal transport can co-exist with proper management thus rickshaw ( most green vehicle) should not be abandoned, people respect the law but we dont have any enforcement for that, most of the street vendors place their box in such space where we usually dont walk on and finally we have to accept the road network that we currently have and do our work to utilise it most properly. So proper management can be a key to resolve this issue. What do you think? If none of the issues are not real then why cant we solve the problem? The answer is, to solve these problems we have to go to its root and find out the real problem. Then that will be a strategic intervention towards a traffic free Dhaka city. Most of child phycologist all around the world face one big question from the parents that their children has started asking question why. This means that when you want to know the basic of each issue then you should ask start asking question with why. For example if we now ask why we have traffic congestion in Dhaka city then we will have three very basic words to answer it and they are (1) people, (2) travel and (3) medium (road / vehicle). So if we start asking question like why so many people, why they travel, why using vehicle then we will start getting the root cause that can eliminate the problem by strategic intervention. Most of management professional would know about fish bone diagram and the way to minimize the problem in a project. In all solution, the crucial part is to identify the problem. If you are able to identify the problem with its root then most likely you can solve the problem. The biggest drawbacks of being developing country are (1) we do not have data that can support our research and (2) we do not have access to resources that we need. May be these are few reasons why government of Bangladesh seek help from World Bank and other donor organisation and over the years these donor organisations help us to solve the problem. I want to refer to an article related to issue According to Nasrin Khandoker and Jonathan Rouse (2004), Congestion in Dhaka has been a growing problem during the last 15 years. In around 1992, the Government of Bangladesh completed a study called The Greater Dhaka Metropolitan Area Integrated Transport Study, funded by the United Nations Development Program. The study recommended an immediate action plan and a long-term strategy to improve transport infrastructure in the Greater Metropolitan area of Dhaka. In response to this, the Government sought assistance from the World Bank to help fund the Dhaka Urban Transport Project (DUTP). So what happens to those projects? These are not the only projects to improve the transportation, there are many of them. Few months ago I had a chance to meet and discuss about a formal World Bank specialist in a seminar at Harvard University who was involved in the above mentioned project of Dhaka city. I was heartbroken by the views of that personnel about the corruption associated with Dhaka Urban Transport Project (DUTP). He was so frustrated that he never got into any WB project with Bangladesh. So at this point, we have to be very serious about this issue as it cant be solved with resources or even foreign expertise. We dont know how many people use what type of vehicle every day. We dont know the flow of people in a certain time of a day and we also dont know the number of people living each ward where their daily destination are. All the data that we can have is out of assumptions. Thats the main problem. Our government took previous decisions under some expert assumptions not from real data. So what we can do to keep track of this and improve the network flow in a proper planned way? Because transportation management is not something that you can solve forever, its a live process, traffic management should improve every day based on previous days data. Anyhow, the only way I can see to tract the travel behaviour is to introduce a travel card for each of the traveller. This single idea of introducing travel card is a vast and interdisciplinary issue and it is never possible without a joint venture of public private partnership. I will discuss about this issue at the last segment of this article to draw an outline for the government to think about it. This travel card is one of the fish bone that also have many implications. For example, using the data from the travel card we can generate scheduling of public transport in proper way to optimize its performance throughout the city. The reason for travel is the most dynamic data that can change every day but there cities get successful when they figure out the pattern of it. This is one of the most crucial part of intervention and it needs multiple dimension to work together. The best way to control peoples travel behaviour is to implement a proper land use plan. Land-use plan means zoning the city and by proper I meant zoning that encourage people to walk more rather than using vehicle. This is one of the most burning urban planning issue nowadays the world is dealing with. Anyway, I am not going to suggest something in this article that is not going to possible in near future. So lets assume that we have a faulty land-use plan and unplanned growth in Dhaka city. What else we can do with this faulty situation that will minimize peoples un-necessary travel need. I can give one simple example, our government postal service is so unreliable and slow that we never think of sending a package within Dhaka city for office or domestic purpose. So we depend on sending those through a messenger or private courier service. In every developed country, postal service is always available within 5 minutes walking distance from each household. This can reduce a significant number of un-necessary traveller every day. Medium is the most visible part and it is mostly emphasised to address transportation issue all over the world. When we think of transportation problem, we most likely think of the medium of transport and its improvement. For example, if you have lived in Dhaka city for the past 10 years, you most likely to remember how many times, government evicted street vendors from Dhaka City Street. Government also tried to make lane for different vehicle on road and yet they couldnt succeed. The word medium does not only mean Road and vehicle it refers to Street and transport. Many of us may do not know the difference between street and road but it is okay if you are not in this discipline. The problem arise when government employ those people to solve the issue and they do not know the difference. Anyway, what I wanted to say is, we should not concentrate on evacuating the street vendor from the street rather we should design a street incorporating them and involving them to maintain the pedestrian what we have designed. If you have migraine then you not going to cut your head, you should try to not have the migraine again by following some strategy. This should be the approach of the government by making a joint venture with private organisations. We have talked about publicprivate joint venture several time in this article and I think now its time to elaborate a little bit with the example that World Bank that I mentioned earlier in this paper. I should not mention the World Bank personnel name as he was in conflict with our current government during his tenure with Dhaka city transport project. But after having discussion with him, I understand why government is continuously failing to improve Dhaka Bas Rapid Transit network. The public transport system of Dhaka city is not actually in government control and there are a lot of stakeholder involve that it cannot be solved without proper planning. The plan should be a win-win situation for every stakeholder otherwise the plan is never going to see the sunlight. The good news is, we are not the only country who is facing this issue of poor plan, poor management and corruption. Many countries in this world has already overcome this issue by creating public-private partnership to make a plan for everyone to win. I believe we also can solve it by doing so. The writer is an architect and urban designer E: [email protected]