"বাক্সে বাক্সে বন্দী বাক্স"
- অর্ণব-এর গান
I don't know what that song is actually referring to, but I remember we played it a lot when we actually put our years and years of life from Chittagong into boxes to move to Dhaka in July 2007.
Anyway, I am reminded of this song again, as I sit here and think of "Thinking out of the box". Where I am headed could be paralleled with HSBC's marketing campaigns where they claim to be "The World's Local Bank". Their ad campaigns showed two items or themes and they would both be the same thing, but in different contexts - the international, and the local.
Instead of prolonging further this introduction, let me get to the point: We need our own solutions to our problems! Think outside the box! Don't go for the obvious! Think about the local situation, the local mindset, the local environment, and costs before taking a decision. I am going to follow up these advisory statements with some ideas, which may very well be just the foolish rants of a lunatic who failed to read the "Don't Step on the Grass" sign.
Traffic Lights.
We spent a lot of effort, time, and money on putting up traffic lights all over town, and that was years and years ago, and we upgraded them in between also with some fancy stuff from Italy as I remember reading some years back. As it is now, there are traffic policemen on every road's end to contain the traffic. The red - light and orange go on and on and it doesn't really affect anything, since people are impatient and could care less for the law, and it actually takes a traffic policeman coming in front of the moving cars to stop them. 4 men at every crossroad (not uncommon these days to see traffic controllers at ends of alleyways inside residential and commercial areas either).
My big idea here is, instead of going with the rest of the world and the electronic traffic lights, why couldn't we have just put up those barriers that stop the cars in front of train lines?
Wonder how much costs we could have saved by putting these up, when there is already issues of sustainable power supply for this ever-expanding city of ours.
City Rail.
Having said that Dhaka is 'ever-expanding', if detailed you would notice its growing taller also as well as sideways. Sideway growth is to an extent good, but the fact remains that the number of businesses and apartments are growing tremendously inside the existing city limits and the roads are filling up with new cars every day. The situation is helped to some extent with lots of bus services around, but I would comment that they are almost 'inhuman' with their small seating spaces, and their mistreatment of passengers. Their sole goal to maximize profits, and they don't care how they do it, resulting in dangerously packed buses (sometimes very visibly leaning to one side), and dangerous driving to get places faster. So, them being there still takes up the road spaces and we are running low on road space. Hence the current declaration of projects to build expressways and overhead light rail trains to curb our congestion. Again, we are possibly looking at a few years' commitment, costs and not to mention, expanding travel ways don't necessarily take care of the growing city's increasing demand on utilities: power, gas and water.
We do however have rail tracks already running through the city, from Komlapur where the train station is to Uttora, and it runs through various key areas of the city - Moghbazar, Mohakhali, etc, ultimately stopping at somewhere in Uttora before finally heading out of the city. We could easily deploy some carriers and arrange the timings of the intercity carriers to accomodate them. Next, all we'd need are planned train stops, some kind of ticketing booth and waiting areas. I am no civil engineer or city planner, but seems to be, this could be worth looking into.
Bigger projects are however more lucrative, I suppose, for local leaders and international financial institutions, and we will always have that dilemma. Its pretty outside the box where ideas are just flowing and growing, but inside the box, the walls are high and slippery.
Get Pro Active Mrs. Government.
