For a country of millions, traffic congestion significantly reduces the economic productivity. This statement holds true for most urban areas of the world, especially Dhaka, the mega-city of Bangladesh. An area of Dhaka which has a lot of potential in terms of both as a residential and commercial region, is undoubtedly the suburb of Uttara. Along with being adjacent to the airport on one side and having a link to industrial areas like Gazipur and Savar on the other, it also has residential amenities in its numerous blocks, making it a colony for traffic congestion. Unfortunately, no sustainable solution has come about to successfully reduce this problem. Hence, this paper tries to understand where the problems lie from the perspectives of the most important stakeholders – the residents and commuters of the area. It supports the use of their simple thinking to reach solutions through suasive instruments, like training and awareness-building campaigns, instead of spending millions on building lengths of roads and investing in technology. A survey of 150 bus passengers and 150 private car owners, coupled with literature review were conducted to accumulate, identify and address the traffic congestion reasons and associated issues. These problems were later used to propose recommendations. Responses revealed that the satisfaction levels of the commuters fell mostly under the ‘dissatisfied’ category (78%), based on parameters like fitness of the bus and driver, behavior of drivers and conductors, etc. Unsurprisingly, most respondents showed interest to pay an extra bit of fare for better bus service and believed that these would greatly help to mitigate the issue of running this sector with ‘unskilled’ and ‘unprofessional’ drivers/conductors (92%). Additionally, the large presence of private cars seemed to cause higher amounts of traffic congestion, but 56% of these users believed that the public buses had poor service and hence, their decision to avoid it as a regular commuting option. Hence, it was clear from the responses and their analysis that only a reliable, comfortable, and safe bus service system (including good drivers, conductors and buses themselves) is what will encourage more people to travel in public buses, leaving behind their private cars. This would in turn, greatly reduce the traffic congestion problem as people will be able/want to follow the traffic regulations better.
Keywords: Buses; Public transport; Sustainable solutions; Traffic congestion; Uttara
Published on: May 1, 2018 Pages: 24-30
Full Text PDF
Full Text HTML
DOI: 10.17352/2455-488X.000023
CrossMark
Publons
Harvard Library HOLLIS
Search IT
Semantic Scholar
Get Citation
Base Search
Scilit
OAI-PMH
ResearchGate
Academic Microsoft
GrowKudos
Universite de Paris
UW Libraries
SJSU King Library
SJSU King Library
NUS Library
McGill
DET KGL BIBLiOTEK
JCU Discovery
Universidad De Lima
WorldCat
VU on WorldCat
PTZ: We're glad you're here. Please click "create a new query" if you are a new visitor to our website and need further information from us.
If you are already a member of our network and need to keep track of any developments regarding a question you have already submitted, click "take me to my Query."