Road safety vital for liveable Dhaka [Part-III]

Bangladesh’s roads have become a national tragedy, claiming thousands of lives every year amid reckless driving, unfit vehicles, corrupt licensing, footpath encroachment, transport syndicates and weak enforcement. A four-part Daily Observer investigation traces the crisis, the failures that sustain it and the reforms needed to make the country’s roads safer.
 
Bangladesh does not lack laws. It lacks the will - and increasingly the capacity - to enforce them. The Road Transport Act, 2018 replaced the Motor Vehicles Ordinance of 1983 and, on paper, is a serious document. It introduced a 12-point demerit system, with a one-year licence suspension after six points are lost and automatic cancellation at 12. It allows up to five years’ imprisonment or a Tk 500,000 fine for death or serious injury caused by reckless or negligent driving, and three years’ imprisonment and a Tk 2.5 million fine for death caused by racing or reckless overtaking. Driving without a licence can bring six months in prison or a Tk 50,000 fine - double the penalties under the old ordinance. Arrest without a warrant is also permitted for offences carrying six months or more in prison, or fines of Tk 50,000 or above.

WHEN A SERIOUS LAW MEETS A RIDICULOUS FINE
Yet elsewhere in the same statute book, the penalties collapse into absurdity. Under Section 137 of the traffic rules, driving without a licence, using a metallic number plate, allowing a tax token to lapse or parking wrongly carries a fine of just Tk 200. Under Section 152, operating without a registration certificate, fitness certificate or route permit - or allowing any of them to expire - carries a separate fine of only Tk 700 per offence.

For owners of ageing, unfit fleets, such sums are less a deterrent than a cost of doing business.

THREE AGENCIES, ONE ROAD AND NO ONE IN CHARGE
Three agencies are meant to share responsibility for Dhaka’s roads: the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, which controls traffic but has no authority over road design or route planning; the BRTA, which issues licences and registrations but has no field enforcement power of its own; and the Dhaka Transport Co-ordination Authority, nominally the coordinating body but, according to one transport-governance analysis, possessing "next to no effective authority" over the other two.

Each moves in its own lane, and the gaps between them are where much of the chaos gathers.

WHERE REGULATION BECOMES A BUSINESS
Nowhere is that gap more corrosively exploited than at the BRTA, long described by one veteran observer as a "den of corruption", where officials and brokers have allegedly turned irregularity into routine.
Unfit vehicles obtain fitness certificates, unqualified applicants receive licences and, allegedly, almost every transaction has its price.

Research by Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) helps explain why reform repeatedly fails. TIB found that around 92 percent of the country's large bus companies have politicians involved in their management, with some 80 percent of them aligned with whichever party holds power at the time.

Ownership and enforcement, in other words, can exist within the same circle.

THE DAILY TOLL ON THE ROAD TO POWER
The financial scale of the resulting extortion is staggering. Industry sources allege that around Tk 100 crore is collected daily from roughly 3,000 spots nationwide. The money is collected in the name of terminal management, parking or municipal fees but, sources say, is overwhelmingly taken by force.

Drivers and owners who refuse to pay describe vehicles being vandalised, workers beaten and passage blocked, leaving them little choice but to keep paying. The costs are ultimately passed on through higher fares and, in turn, higher prices for ordinary goods.

Transport Minister Sheikh Robiul Alam has called extortion "a criminal offence" and said responsibility for tackling it lies with law enforcement. Transport owners, however, insist the money is a negotiated contribution to terminal management. Workers and industry insiders say the reality is closer to extortion by another name.

THE FOOTPATH HAS BECOME A REVENUE STREAM
Dhaka's roads have also become an informal economy at the public's expense. TIB and BIGD research found that around Tk 1,825 crore is collected annually in illegal rent from Dhaka's footpaths alone, while about 40 percent of pavement space is occupied by shops, hawkers and building materials. Pedestrians are consequently forced into traffic - the very danger the footpaths are supposed to protect them from.

Foot-overbridges built for safe crossings have, in some places, become shelters for drug users and homeless people rather than functioning as crossings.

Political and social programmes - from sit-ins and rallies over murder cases to demonstrations demanding changes such as an increase in the retirement age of civil servants - routinely block major roads, adding another layer of paralysis to the daily crush.

THE MOVEMENT THAT EXPOSED A SYSTEM'S BROKEN PROMISE
Nearly a decade of road-safety activism has repeatedly run into the same wall. The 2018 students' movement, sparked by the deaths of two teenagers under a speeding bus, briefly pushed authorities to introduce a pilot scheme of company-run, disciplined bus services along the Gulshan corridor. Transport owners also made commitments on vehicle fitness, closed doors and ending daily-lease driving.

"None of them - the police, the owners, the BRTA - kept their word," Dr Samsul Haque said.

A later attempt to consolidate Dhaka's chaotic and competing bus routes under a single franchise system, branded Dhaka Nagar Paribahan, also stalled under pressure from existing owners. Once again, the government backed down.

THE 686 BODIES THAT OPERATE BEYOND THE LAW
Behind these repeated failures lies an ecosystem of some 932 registered owner-labour organisations in the transport sector. Industry sources say 686 are not legally registered, operating under the umbrella of larger established bodies such as the Bangladesh Road Transport Owners' Association, the Dhaka Road Transport Owners' Association and the Bangladesh Road Transport Workers' Federation.

Nirapad Sarak Chai's Elias Kanchan and others argue that banning these unrecognised bodies outright could choke off much of the extortion network at its root.

Advocate Jyotirmoy Barua takes a broader view, arguing that without political accountability behind enforcement, "a law like this might as well not exist". Laws, he says, "exist essentially to be broken" when they are kept to protect the interests of the powerful.

For ordinary people, he argues, protection is barely visible in the amendments.