Tuhin Shubhra Adhikary

When the first batch of buses, launched in December last year to introduce a new system in the capital’s bus service, are struggling to provide expected services, two more routes are going to be brought under the system from tomorrow. 

Nine years behind schedule and costing 61 percent more, the Third Shitalakkhya Bridge is finally going to be opened to the public tomorrow.

Despite the opening of the Padma Bridge and the Madhumati Bridge, the country will not be able to reap the maximum benefit of the enhanced connectivity as the 129km road from Faridpur’s Bhanga to Jashore’s Benapole is still not ready for increased vehicular movement.

Two more major roadway bridges will be opened to traffic on Monday (October 10, 2022), giving a big boost to the internal communication and beyond.

The Mass Rapid Transit Line-2 project, another metro rail line to be laid out from Gabtoli to Chittagong Road on Dhaka-Chattogram Highway, faces a setback with the authorities now seeking to change the way it would be financed and implemented.

Physical work to expand the Dhaka-Sylhet Highway is going to start finally, around seven years after a feasibility study was done to take up a project to improve connectivity between the capital and the southeast region, and beyond.

Bangladesh is going to start exporting goods to India by train for the first time in what is billed by many as a major boost to cross-border trade.

Bizarrely, a lawmaker with her personal assistant and Roads and Highways Department chief engineer and an additional chief engineer are going to the US and Canada to inspect equipment like pothole repair machines before they are shipped to Bangladesh.

Construction work of Bus Rapid Transit Line-3 Project resumed yesterday, after a girder segment fell on a car on August 15 killing five people that prompted the authorities to suspend work.

If a driver of a truck feels tired during his long journey on highways, there are no facilities for them to rest.

With 67 percent of the locomotives of Bangladesh Railway (BR) past their economic life, the state-run agency has turned to India for the second time in less than four years to mitigate its engine crisis.

The two buses that collided head-on in Rangpur early yesterday, leaving at least eight dead and over 50 injured, should not have been on the roads at all as neither had route permits. 

The implementing authority of the BRT Line-3 has so far spent Tk 5.57 crore for ensuring safety at the project site, but it has failed to do so. The deaths of five people last month are a testament to the failure.

When Bangladesh Railway in December 2010 took up the project for constructing Khulna-Mongla new rail line without any feasibility study, its deadline was December 2013.

Another railway project involving a Chinese contractor has plunged into deep uncertainty after a government committee directed the authorities not to take the hard loan arranged by the company.

With the project authorities of BRT Line-3 having already failed to achieve their revised target, a recent tragedy has left them in further difficulties in meeting the proposed deadline of December 2022.

Bangladesh Railway yesterday signed two separate contracts with consultants for two expansion projects, just four months before the project deadlines end.

The much-awaited Bekutia Bridge, formally known as the 8th Bangladesh-China Friendship Bridge, in Pirojpur is set to be opened on September 4.

Different government agencies have built at least 140 level crossings across the country over the last four years without taking permission from Bangladesh Railway.

Supply issues of ballast for railway tracks and complexities centring shifting utility lines inside Dhaka city are the new challenges facing Dhaka-Jashore rail line project, which is already running behind the original schedule.