City Desk :
The bustling city of Dhaka is emblematic of urban dynamism and cultural richness.
However, its undeniable charm is often overshadowed by the chaotic and unmanageable traffic situation that plagues its streets.
The dire state of traffic in Dhaka is a complex issue that is caused by the pervasive unruliness among road users.
The proposition might more accurately be phrased the other way around: I was stuck in traffic, therefore I was in Dhaka.
If you spend some time in Bangladesh’s capital, you begin to look anew at the word “traffic,” and to revise your definition. In other cities, there are vehicles and pedestrians on the roads; occasionally, the roads get clogged, and progress is impeded. The situation in Dhaka is different. Dhaka’s traffic is traffic in extremis, a state of chaos so pervasive and permanent that it has become the city’s organizing principle.
The vehicles headed northwards go up to the expressway from Bijoy Sarani and Tejgaon. As a result, traffic has increased at Bijoy Sarani, Tejgaon, Shat Rasta and adjacent areas. According to the traffic police, already 15 points in Dhaka were identified as traffic jam hubs. The traffic congestion is increasing in those areas too.
Overall, the speed of vehicles is retarding in Dhaka city. Based on a study of the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research, a report of the weekly magazine Time said that Dhaka now tops the list of the world’s slowest moving cities.
In the 2016 Global Liveability Survey, the quality of life report issued annually by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Dhaka ranked 137th out of 140 cities, edging out only Lagos, Tripoli and war-torn Damascus; its infrastructure rating was the worst of any city in the survey.
Like other megacities of the developing world, Dhaka is both a boomtown and a necropolis, with a thriving real-estate market, a growing middle class and a lively cultural and intellectual life that is offset by rampant misery: poverty, pollution, disease, political corruption, extremist violence and terror attacks.
But it is traffic that has sealed Dhaka’s reputation among academics and development specialists as the great symbol of 21st-century urban dysfunction, the world’s most broken city.
It has made Dhaka a surreal place, a town that is both frenetic and paralyzed, and has altered the rhythms of daily life for its 17.5 million-plus residents.
Not long ago, the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper published an article titled “5 Things to Do While Stuck in Traffic.” Suggested activities included “catching up with friends,” reading and journaling.
The first chapter of my own Dhaka journal begins in March of last year, on a highway that runs south from Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport into the center of town.
If you do a web search for this stretch of road, you may come across a Facebook page titled “Highway to Hell, Airport Road.”
Photographs posted online reveal the nature of the hell, aerial shots capturing a scrum of automobiles strewn at odd angles across eight lanes of road. It looks like a Matchbox set that has been scattered by an angry toddler: the morning commute as a cosmic temper tantrum.
For weeks, Bangladesh had been gripped by a hartal, a nationwide general strike and “transportation blockade.”
The hartal, called by the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, was an effort to pressure Prime Minster Sheikh Hasina into holding new elections.
The strike had disrupted everyday life in the capital, with street demonstrations and sporadic violence causing Dhaka’s denizens to curb their normal routines.
It had accomplished the seemingly impossible, breaking the logjam on Dhaka’s streets. A Bangladeshi on my flight explained the situation.
“In Dhaka, you have either horrible traffic or really horrible traffic,” he said. “But with the hartal, there will be almost no traffic.
Traffic will be O.K.”
Horrible traffic, really horrible traffic, almost no traffic, O.K. traffic – it takes just a few minutes in Dhaka to realize that these are not scientific terms. When my plane touched down I caught a taxi, which exited the airport into a roundabout before making its way onto the infamous highway.
There, unmistakably, was a traffic jam: cars and trucks, as far the eye could see, stacked up in a configuration that bore no clear relationship to the lanes painted on the blacktop. My cab nosed into the convoy. Whereupon a crawl commenced.
