The flyover fetish
Photo: STAR
Dhaka city's traffic problems are a case-in-point of the prevailing mentality of the government. Attend to the symptoms half-heartedly when the problem becomes unbearable, never ever address the root cause of the problem, always blame the previous government, and talk about expensive projects that do nothing to address short-term problems. When these solutions are finally delivered a decade later, late and over-budget, they won't do anything to solve the problem (e.g., the Mohakhali flyover). The truth of the matter is that the solution of many of the problems in Dhaka does not include flyovers, large projects, or flamboyant groundbreaking ceremonies with flower garlands and politicians. Small, strategic, corrective and preventive measures would solve a lot of the problems in Dhaka. It baffles the imagination this common collective fetish of the government intelligentsia for large projects. A concerted drive once every 5 years (or even once every year) to drive illegal cars off the road is completely ineffective in the long term. This is the equivalent of cutting the weeds at the stem, and not at the root. The solution to this problem is enforcement of current laws, which are arguably sufficient to ensure bad vehicles stay off the road. Not just enforcement, but sustained enforcement, even when the ridiculous Dhaka traffic is not on the newspaper or when the prime minister gets inconvenienced. This approach is monumentally difficult for the government to implement, however. The reasons for this are manifold. First, the government itself does not adhere to its own laws. Their own vehicles will violate these laws (because somehow people who work in government feel that they are beyond government). Secondly, it is not so much getting started, but the follow-through where we hold the government in question. The same goes for illegal land-grabbing and encroachment of rivers and lakes, and many of the other problems in Bangladesh. We a have an excellent corpus of legal precedent, but we have no enforcement capability. We simply don't need new laws, but merely better enforcement of our existing ones. These drives to run illegal vehicles off the road, and announcement of major projects like a Dhaka metro rail service or other flyovers are all well and good, and they are necessary, but not essential to solving the vast majority of problems in Dhaka. Small measures, like improving municipal services like more regular garbage collection, maintaining cleaner streets, consistently enforcing certain laws without them devolving into another way for the police officers to extort money from locals, are all ways to ameliorate the symptoms, and someone with the genuine will to investigate the problem will be able to address them: the problem is not intractable. But this unhealthy obsession with grandiose projects, which are promised as the be-all and end-all of all the problems, needs to stop. We need to begin having an honest dialogue with our mayors and politicians. People deserve the leaders that they get. We need to begin exacting the change we want to see in our society.
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