Millions leave capital early to escape Eid chaos

They come with bulging travel bags and sleeping children in arms, with umbrellas tucked under elbows and food packets swinging from tired hands.

At Kamalapur Railway Station on Friday afternoon, the scene was unmistakable: tens of thousands of Dhaka’s residents, gripped by the pull of home ahead of Eid-ul-Azha, were already voting with their feet — leaving early to beat the chaos they know is coming.

By mid-morning, the station’s platforms were thick with the hum of public address announcements, the shuffle of luggage on wet concrete — it had rained briefly — and the barely-suppressed excitement of people preparing to leave the capital behind. A few spread old newspapers on the floor and sat down to wait.

Others pressed phones to their ears: “I’m on the train. Don’t worry.”

Habibbul Basar, a private sector employee found at Platform 6 with a trolley bag and a sweat-drenched shirt, summed up the calculus driving thousands of early departures.

“I already sent the children ahead when school let out. Now we’re going too,” he said, a satisfied smile breaking through the fatigue. “Leave it any later and the pressure only gets worse.”

University student Hafizul Islam, waiting on a Rajshahi-bound train, offered the same logic. “There are still a few days to Eid. But right now the crowd is a little manageable. A few days from now it won’t be.”

The anxiety is not unfounded. On normal days, Dhaka’s combined transport network — buses, trains, launches, aircraft, and private vehicles — can move roughly 650,000 passengers to their destinations.

In the days before Eid-ul-Azha, that figure swells to an average of three million daily. The gap between what the system can carry and what it is asked to carry is not a crack but a chasm.

An analysis of data from government ministries, transport associations and road-sector bodies reveals the stark arithmetic: on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday alone, an estimated nine million people will leave Dhaka and its surrounding areas — three million per day.

Against that, buses can handle a maximum of 480,000 passengers daily; trains 39,796; launches around 55,000; domestic flights roughly 6,600; and motorcycles and private or hired vehicles together another 70,000. Total daily capacity: approximately 651,000. The system will be asked to carry at least five times more than it can.

The Passenger Welfare Association’s own projections are grimmer still: two million departures on Monday, three million on Tuesday and four million on Wednesday. After Eid, a further 1.2 million will need to return.

This year, the road crisis carries additional complications. Ongoing construction works on the country’s major arteries have narrowed traffic flow at precisely the wrong moment.

On the Dhaka-Tangail-Jamuna Bridge highway, flyover construction between Elenga and Bangabandhu Bridge — a 13.5-kilometre stretch — is expected to produce severe gridlock.

On the eastern corridor, four-laning work on the Dhaka-Sylhet and Asian Highway bypass routes is adding to delays, while the Dhaka-Chittagong and Dhaka-Mymensingh highways are already seeing slow-moving queues.

Adding to the pressure, trucks loaded with sacrificial cattle are now entering the highway network ahead of Eid-ul-Azha, and disorganised cattle market management is expected to further slow arterial roads, increasing both journey times and costs for ordinary passengers.

Highway police have identified 94 high-risk congestion points across the network.

Between May 23 and 27, Bangladesh Railway will operate 218 trains out of Dhaka — 118 to the eastern zone, 100 to the western.

An average of 43 passenger trains will depart Kamalapur daily, offering a total of 159,187 seats across all classes over five days, with an additional 25 per cent of passengers travelling on standing tickets.

The demand, however, is incomparably larger: during Eid, the railway’s ticketing system recorded 221.5 million online hits, with a single-day peak of 55.5 million.

Railway Director General Md. Afzal Hossain was candid about the limits.

“Even with long-term planning to increase coaches, locomotives and manpower, not even a quarter of the demand can be met,” he said, adding that efforts were nonetheless underway to expand capacity.

On the waterways, 121 launches are ready to operate from Sadarghat, collectively capable of carrying between 50,000 and 55,000 passengers daily — around 150,000 over three days.

Last Eid, some 400,000 people returned home by launch; the figure is expected to be similar this time.

Separately, Bangladesh Railway has begun advance ticket sales for post-Eid return journeys, with 100 per cent of intercity seats sold online.

Tickets for June 1 went on sale Friday morning; those for June 2, 3 and 4 will follow on May 23, 24 and 25 respectively.

Tickets purchased under this scheme cannot be refunded, and each buyer may purchase a maximum of four seats.

‘There Will Be Problems — There’s No Avoiding It’ Transport owners acknowledge the scale of the problem but argue that the economics of the industry make a structural solution all but impossible.

“Such extreme pressure occurs only 20 to 25 days a year,” one association representative explained.

“There is no justification for expanding year-round capacity to address a problem that lasts only a few days.” Kazi Md. Jobayer Masud, joint general secretary of the Bangladesh Road Transport Owners’ Association, was blunter still.

“There will be problems for two days — there’s no avoiding it,” he said, predicting that May 26 and 27 would see the heaviest pressure. “Neither the police, nor BRTA, nor we together can manage that pressure.”

Transport experts lay the blame squarely on state institutions.

BUET professor and transport specialist Moazzem Hossain Chowdhury argued that while private operators cannot be expected to hold excess capacity for a few days of peak demand, government bodies should think differently.

“On roads, you cannot simply add more vehicles — the roads themselves have limits.

But in rail and waterways, government operators can maintain higher capacity. More trains and launches can be added if there is the will. The system is there; what is needed is initiative.”

State Minister for Road Transport Habibur Rashid, attending a road accident compensation event in Comilla on Friday, acknowledged the structural limits plainly.

“We have limitations,” he said. “Even so, we try to make the best possible use of what capacity we have.”

He added that the Dhaka-Chittagong highway is being expanded to ten lanes and that road accident rates are declining — though the Passenger Welfare Association and transport analysts remain sceptical that these measures address the immediate Eid crisis.

Transport Minister Sheikh Rabiul Alam, speaking at the same event, insisted that this year’s Eid journey “will be comfortable” if passengers cooperate and weather conditions remain favourable.

“Transporting roughly 25 million people and sacrificial animals in a short period is a massive challenge,” he conceded, but added that coordinated preparation across ministries should ease the burden.

When the formal system reaches its limits, passengers improvise — and the improvisation carries its own risks.

Cattle trucks returning to the regions after delivering animals to Dhaka’s markets become makeshift passenger transport.

Workers from the industrial areas of Gazipur, Savar and Narayanganj charter city local buses for long-distance journeys.

Some passengers, particularly to destinations along the railway’s eastern routes, attempt to travel on train rooftops.

Others hire ambulances, occasionally staging a fake patient to secure one. An estimated 10,000 motorcycles carry 20,000 passengers home each day.

“The country has not built the capacity to manage the pre-Eid passenger surge,” said Mozammel Haque Chowdhury, secretary general of the Passenger Welfare Association.

“As a result, people ride empty trucks, climb onto train roofs and pay extra for city buses, microbuses and motorcycles. They take risks to get home.”