One of the world’s most congested cities gets first mass-transit rail

Bangladesh’s capital is about to get its first metro rail, a Japanese-funded project that aims to ease commuting in one of the world’s most congested cities.

A section of the 20-kilometre (12.427 mi) urban rail project, known as Line 6, will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday. The line currently connects the northern area of ​​Dhaka to the center with government offices and hospitals in the centre. Eventually it will cut south from downtown into the financial district of Motijheel.

While the project is likely to make a significant difference to the way people travel in Dhaka, its opening will also bring some much-needed political mileage to Hasina’s government. With elections expected in January 2024, the leader and his party are under pressure as the South Asian nation’s foreign exchange reserves dwindle and it grapples with inflation and an energy crisis.

In Dhaka, with 10.3 million people crammed into 305 square kilometers (117.76 sq mi), the average driving speed has dropped from 21 kilometers per hour 10 years ago to less than 7 kilometers (4.3496 miles) per hour now. Given current trends, a World Bank report has estimated that it could be as low as 4 kilometers per hour, slower than walking.

“This is an extremely important development for a city like Dhaka,” Martin Rama, advisor to the Presidency of the World Bank and former regional chief economist for South Asia, said in an interview. “If you look at the case of India in many cities, there has been a lot of change in the way people commute to work. It is a safer mode of transport, for example, for women, which is not trivial in South Asia. “

At the same time, Rama said that “it would be naive to think that the problem of congestion will go away immediately” because every time a country builds public transport infrastructure and adds more capacity, 90–95% of the free road becomes empty. additional traffic.

Traffic congestion causes approximately 3.2 million working hours to be lost each day and costs the Bangladeshi economy billions of dollars every year. Dhaka is the seventh least liveable in a list of 172 cities in the world on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index for 2022.

Rama said, “The bigger your city, the longer you typically spend commuting.” “So it’s a congestion cost that detracts from what the city has to offer.”

Bangladesh approved a 219.85 billion taka ($2.1 billion) fund for the Line 6 project in 2012, at which time Japan provided 165.95 billion taka. The cost later increased to 334.72 billion taka as the authorities added a new section connecting the metro rail to Kamlapur, the central railway station that links Dhaka and the rest of the country.

Japan is also funding two other urban railway lines in Dhaka. Upon completion, the three subway lines are projected to carry two million passengers daily, according to the Japan International Cooperation Agency website.

The Dhaka Metro Rail comes six months after Hasina inaugurated the country’s longest river bridge over the Padma River, spanning over 6 km. It is expected to connect 80 million people – half the country’s population – from the south-west to the north-east.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)