Eventually it will run across the city to the Motijheel financial district in the south.
Bangladesh’s capital is about to get its first metro rail, a Japanese-funded project that aims to make commuting easier in one of the busiest cities in the world.
Part of the 20-kilometer urban rail project, known as Line 6, will be inaugurated on Wednesday by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The line provisionally connects the northern zone of Dhaka with a hub of government offices and hospitals in the middle. Eventually it will run across the city to the Motijheel financial district in the south.
While the project is likely to bring significant changes to the way people travel in Dhaka, its inauguration will also provide much-needed political milestones for Hasina’s government. With elections expected in January 2024, the leader and her party are under pressure as the South Asian country’s foreign exchange reserves dwindle and it struggles with inflation and energy crises.
In Dhaka, with 10.3 million people crammed into 305 square kilometers (117.76 square miles), average driving speeds have fallen to less than 7 kilometers (4.3496 miles) now from 21 kilometers per hour 10 years ago. Given current trends, a World Bank report estimates it could drop to 4 kilometers per hour, slower than walking.
“It’s an extremely important development for a city like Dhaka,” Martin Rama, an adviser to the World Bank presidency and former regional chief economist for South Asia, said in an interview. “If you look at the case of India in many cities, it has greatly changed the way people go to work. For example, it is a safe mode of transport for women, which is not trivial in South Asia.”
At the same time, Rama said it would be “naive to think that congestion problems will disappear immediately” because every time a country builds public transport infrastructure and adds more capacity, 90-95% of the freed road space is taken up by additional traffic.
Traffic congestion wastes about 3.2 million working hours every day and costs the Bangladesh economy billions of dollars every year. Dhaka is the seventh least livable in a list of 172 cities in the world on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Livability Index for 2022.
“The bigger your city is, the more time you spend commuting,” said Rama. “So it’s congestion costs that detract 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, while Japan provided 165.95 billion taka at the time. The cost later rose to 334.72 billion taka when the authorities added a new section connecting the metro rail to Kamalapur, the central railway station connecting Dhaka and the rest of the country.
Japan also finances two other urban railway lines in Dhaka. According to the Japan International Cooperation Agency website, three subway lines will carry two million passengers daily upon completion.
The Dhaka metro track follows six months after Hasina commissioned the longest river bridge in the country, which spans the Padma River for more than 6 kilometers. That is expected to connect 80 million people – half the country’s population – from the Southwest to the Northeast.
(This story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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