Elevated expressway in Dhaka's traffic landscape

With the opening of the 11.5 km segment of the elevated expressway from Kawla, a place close to Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport (HSIA), to Farmgate, the tailback-ridden city can really hope for a  phenomenal change in its traffic movement. It will take just 10-12 minutes to course the distance by private cars and perhaps a few minutes more by public buses. Yet the opening of the roughly one-fourth segment of the 46.7 km expressway ending at Kutubkhali on the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway can derive only partial benefits right now. But it surely unfolds the prospect of a highly desirable commute from nearly one end of the city to the other. Together with the metro rail now in operation between Diabari, Uttara, and Agargaon – almost half the distance of the entire route up to Kamalapur – the overhead expressway will not only take capital's commute to a new level but is  expected also to impact the traffic movement on its intricate network of roads and streets below in a positive manner.

Both the metro rail and expressway are overhead system of transportation with one serving as a purely mass transport and the other not doing the job in the same measure but quite extensively. The expressway will facilitate movement of cars more than that of public buses. A short commute by public buses may not be affordable to the low-income people on a regular basis. But if the combined beneficial impacts are felt on the roads below, the poor and low-income commuters will enjoy the benefit indirectly. However, this will be possible only when the city's burgeoning population can be maintained at the present level. Since that possibility looks dim, because of the fact of fast urbanisation of the city's peripheries with more people coming to huddle in there. This city with just one per cent of the country's total land area is now home to 32 per cent of the total urban population. Without decentralisation, the city stands to be unsustainable notwithstanding the mega projects like metro rail and elevated expressway.

There is yet another highly important aspect of express commute awaiting consideration. It is the east-west communication link across the city. Basically, the main roads such as the Mymensingh Road, Mirpur Road and the Rampura Road all run north-south and the Bijoy Sarani and Panthapath serve merely as link roads. In the same way, the Banglamotor-Maghbazar-Santinagar-Kamalapur Road or for that matter Gulistan-Kamalapur-Basabo Road is nothing more than a feeder road each. Even the flyover that branches out of the Maghbazar Flyover is such a link only.

The government is reportedly all set to undertake two projects of underground metro rail but none actually addresses the inadequacy of east-west commute. With the opening of the Padma Bridge, city people with ancestral homes in southern, south-western and western districts are increasingly looking for residential accommodations in the Keraniganj-Bosila areas. Already sprawling townships have come into being on the western side of the flood protection dam. Similarly, housing arrangements are on in areas well beyond Basabo. Rampura-Badda have also seen proliferation of housing and population. So the city needs an expressway or a metro rail – preferably both – facility to connect its eastern part with that of the west.