Identifying the deficiencies of landuse-transport development in Dhaka city

Abstract

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the nation’s gateway, has now been turned into the 26th Mega city and 10th most populous city in the world. The development processes of Dhaka city rapidly increased with tremendous growth of population and physical expansion, over 30 and 20 times respectively within the period of 1951 to 2001. Unfortunately, the city experiences the proliferation of scattered and unplanned development without appropriate guidance resulting in immense landuse and transport deficiencies in the city. In this study, an attempt has been made to identify the deficiencies of landuse-transport development in Dhaka city. Though, the study emphasis has been made on the identification of landuse and transport development, road network, operational and function deficiencies, finally a set of short and medium term recommendations also have been proposed for improving the situation. After liberation, for the centralization of development works, political & administrative power, high investment in already developed areas, potential employment opportunities, discrepancy of income level between the city and other regions of the country, the city population has been increased in an uncontrolled and unpredictable way (8% per annum, 3.5 times higher than the prediction). Whereas, for the lack of proper plan and regulation (though 3 plans and 7 construction and improvement acts have been developed since 1952, no completed master plan yet) the city has developed almost unguided and unplanned way. Indeed, lack of buildable land for the causes of low topography (75% are below the natural water level and 95% within 5 to 7 meters flood level) aggravated the problems and forced to densify unplanned settlement (73% fully unplanned) of these huge populations (around 6 millions in DCC area and over 10 millions in DMA area) in the marshy land. Immense densification (around 45 thousands per sq.km) and mushrooming development of residential (62%), commercial (8%) and other infrastructure trimmed down the opportunity to construct new road infrastructure or to introduce modern system for improving overall transportation system. There are only 1286 km road in the DCC area including 52 percent inaccessible road for motorized vehicles which covered around 6.5 percent of the city area but actually the functional road is only 2 percent of the city area. This scarcity of the road (0.21 meters per capita, whereas many other cities it varies between 4.5 to 0.5 meters) is one of the fundamental inherent weaknesses of the city of Dhaka for their deficient landuse and transport panning. The unplanned and haphazard orientation of road networks viz. no east-west continuous road, huge missing links (9 major strategic links are missing in the major roads), staggered & Tjunction (six staggered junctions within the 5.19 kilometer of Mipur road and 19 major Tjunctions in major three roads), right angle bend (5 in major roads), no classical and functional hierarchy, lack of functional gateway, discontinuity of the main road also leads to built-in problems on the operational and management aspects of the transportation system and functionally sabotages the entire street network performance. Continuous focus on road based network system has also weakened potentials and attractiveness of other types of transportation system like rail or water transport (approximately 18.7 millions intra city trips per day, among them the share of intra city commuter train and launch are only 5000 and 2000 passengers respectively). Indeed, there has no integration between different modes, whereas one is depriving others (altogether 51 railway level crossings are interrupting on road vehicle on both sides of rail gates on an average of 5 to 6.0 hours in each day in each level crossing, 14 low bridges are cutting off the circular waterway facility). The interchange or interface facilities between different modes are also very poor (no direct connectivity between bus station to rail station or launch station to bus station). On the other hand, mix mode of traffic (though-local, MT-NMT, large-small), excessive dependency on rickshaws (0.5 millions) reduces the functional efficiency of the road transport system. At present, the elimination or proper management of these massive number of rickshaws is almost impossible because of fully ignorance of traffic rules and regulations of the rickshaw pullers (92%), lack of basic minimum education and training (90%), huge number of families’ economically dependency on rickshaws (0.8 millions), lack of alternative sufficient job facilities in the local market (around 0.9 millions are employed in providing rickshaw services) as well as inaccessible road in the local area (around 52%), poor public transport and mixed landuse pattern in all over the city. For the improvement of the existing road transport system, there have also very limited scope to apply traditional low cost but very cost-effective traffic management measures viz. one-way operation (only 0.31% road at present), tidal flow, signal co-ordination, right turn restriction along with reduction of signal phasing (among 59 signalized intersections, 47 (80%) intersections phases are equal to its approaches), access control (around 10 side road per km per side in the main roads), exclusive bus lane etc. in the present landuse and transportation system of the Mega city Dhaka. Even, high cost management tools like grade separated interchanges, construction of well design flyovers, implementation of BRT, MRT is also difficult for the causes of haphazard densification and unplanned development, road side and junction corner points development, inconsistent road width (44 m to 17 m is a major road), conflict between other utility services, conflict between different existing and proposed road projects as well as wrong policies for the transport system. Buses are the main player of the mass transit system in Dhaka city but the total road length of the bus operating route is only 120 km comprising 22 east-west links which is covering only around one third of the metropolitan areas. The performance of this service is not quite good and seems very difficult to improve the condition in present situation. In spite of having huge benefit and large potentials, successfully implementation of BRT would be very challenging tasks particularly for the causes of insufficient road width in different segments of major roads (17 m in some segments), insufficient space for BRT station and interface facilities, overlapping bus routes (120 km road but 149 routes, 57 routes in one segment, varied between 100% to 5% at start and end segment in some proposed BRT routes), fragmented ownership (around 5000 buses but 1200 owners), huge pedestrians movements (10,000 to 20,000 in some busy points), huge number of bus operators (57.6% buses are owned by individuals), less productive intersections (96% are equal phases of its approaches) etc. Almost all of those deficiencies initiated from the initial planning problems, it is almost impossible to change the preliminary planning and development deficiencies at the present condition of the city. Indeed, incomplete understanding of the inherent weaknesses of the city couple with lack of long term vision, the authorities are providing piecemeal solution without a long term vision which is becoming an extra burden on the overall systems of the city and the city is now growing with a pattern of decaying growth. However, the ultimate solution could be gradually shifting of the capital city of Bangladesh like many other countries of the world viz. Pakistan, India, South Korea etc.