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

Bloomberg

Bangladesh’s capital now has its first metro rail, a Japanese-funded project that aims to ease commuting in one of the most congested cities in the world.
A section of the over 20-kilometre (12.427 miles) urban rail project, known as Line 6, was inaugurated by PM Sheikh Hasina. The line connects the northern zone of Dhaka to a hub of government offices and hospitals in the middle for now. Eventually it will cut through the city to the financial district of Motijheel in the south.
While the project is likely to bring significant changes to how people travel in Dhaka, its inauguration will also give some much-needed political mileage to Hasina’s government. With elections expected in January 2024, the leader and her party are under pressure as the South Asian nation’s foreign currency reserves dwindle and it battles inflation and energy crises.
The metro rail “added another feather” to Bangladesh’s cap and is “another milestone in development,” Hasina said at the opening ceremony. She was the first passenger to ride the train amid tight security. The service will open to the public on Thursday.
In Dhaka, with 10.3 million people packed in 305 square kilometres (117.76 square miles), the average driving speeds have dropped to less than 7 kilometres (4.3496 miles) an hour right now from 21 kilometres an hour 10 years ago. Given the current trends, a World Bank report has estimated it could drop as low as
4 kilometres an hour, slower than walking.
“It’s an extremely important development for a city like Dhaka,” Martín Rama, a consultant with the World Bank’s presidency and former regional chief economist for South Asia, said. “If you look at the case of India in many cities, it has changed a lot the way people go to work. It’s a safe means of transportation, for instance, for women, which in South Asia is not trivial.”
At the same time, Rama said it would be “naive to think that congestion problems will go away” immediately because every time a country builds public transport infrastructure and adds more capacity, 90-95% of the freed up road space is taken up by additional traffic.