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Hassles of the helpless commuters

Rizanuzzaman Laskar
When Mushfiqur Rahman set off for a job interview in a late June morning, he thought it was going to be a great day.
He thought he would turn up at the office in Mohammadpur exactly five minutes before the interview, have a pep talk with his would-be employers and pick up some sweets on his way back home before popping the good news to his family
Thinking about the wonderful day ahead, Mushfiq, out in his trimmed business shirt, combed-back hair and polished wingtips, queued at the bus stop.
But the day was not as great for him as he thought After waiting at the bus stop for more than 30 minutes, missing two buses and having a vicious argument with the bus operator, Mushfiq decided to take a three-wheeler instead.
The fresh graduate made the mistake by snubbing the first CNG three-wheeler he came across after the driver demanded a high fare. It did not take him long to realise the blunder as every three-wheeler and taxicab he approached afterwards refused him a ride.
Suddenly, it started to rain while the sun shone brilliantly above his head. "Great," Mushfiq said to himself, "as if things were not bad enough as it is."
Another half an hour later, Mushfiq found himself pleading to the umpteenth taxicab driver to 'help' him and take him in. "Brother, I really need to be in Mohammadpur in 30 minutes. Please give me a ride and help me out," hesaid.
"The traffic is really intense over there," the grey haired driver smiled apologetically. "Besides the taxi needs to be refuelled and there are no filling stations in that area," he said before scootingoff.
It was not before another hour when Mushfiq finally managed to reach his interviewers' office, a good 40 minutes after the interviewtime.
Mushfiq, in his half-drenched shirt and mud-covered shoes found out that his interview was cancelled for being late. "I smiled, thanked the receptionist and came out of the office. But truth be told, I felt like screaming out loud," he told Star City.
William Shakespeare once said better three hours too soon than a minute late. However, in the capital city, the trend of time keeping is often quite the opposite.
"It is not that we are terrible time keepers," said Moshiul
Alam, a high school teacher, "but rather, it is the excessive traffic tailbacks and lack of public transport facilities that make punctuality a big issue for anyone living in the city."
Indeed, for the thousands of helpless commuters every day moving from one place to another within the city is getting increasingly difficult day by day.
Cases of a businessman keeping his clients waiting a the office, a student turning up late for an examination, public service vehicles leaving and arriving late have become the norm rather than the exception.
While bulk of the population has to rely on buses and minibuses to travel between places, the capital city has only around six thousand buses and minibuses to accommodate its 14 million commuters, sources said.
"On average, over 500 buses out of the 6,000 tend to sit idle for technical problems," said an official of Bangladesh Road Transport Authority. "Therefore, the whole city virtually have to depend on around 5,500 buses each day."
Many housewives, office goers, school children say that rickshaws offered an alternative mode of transport for them. But
many city roads are now off-limits to rickshaws and they have no choice other than virtually begging of the taxi drivers to take them to their destinations.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) Joint Commissioner (Traffic) Jasimuddin said this is not a new situation prevailing in the city's public transport sector. "It is pretty common these days that drivers of public transport modes manipulate certain situations to extract undue fares and harass the passengers in different manners."
It is impossible on the part of the police alone to streamline the entire traffic system, he said. "The process of issuing driving licence is faulty and the situation is such that some people who do not even know the ABC of traffic rules obtain driving licence quite often."
About 80 new cars, minibuses and other vehicles hit the streets of Dhaka every day. There are rules, but many people do not obey them.
"I honestly do not think there is any solution to the transport problem. There are just way too many people here," said Mushfiqur Rahman, a resident of Goran. "I reckon we will just have to spend the bulk of the rest of our lives sitting in traffic jams."