People flock to cities, despite all the traffic congestion and pollution, for one reason: Cities offer opportunities that don’t exist in smaller towns and villages, whether educational, professional, or treatment-related. Once in the city, people accept the disadvantages in exchange for the advantages. Yet our discontent is constant and our capacity to bring about positive change is much less so.

Many factors come into play to make a city livable, including affordable housing, decent infrastructure and services (sewer, electricity, waste disposal, etc.), abundant open and green spaces, availability of good jobs, l education, health care, etc. If drinking water is vital, so is clean air; we not only need decent housing, but also the ability to sleep at night. The existence of quality schools, healthcare and public spaces is of limited use if we cannot access them safely and conveniently.

Too often, cities are destroyed before they have the opportunity to provide a decent life due to an overemphasis on mobility, particularly the movement and storage of cars and other motorized vehicles. When we design our cities for the comfort and convenience of cars, it is almost impossible to offer people the qualities mentioned above. Cars are simply too expensive, too bulky, inefficient, polluting and dangerous to be good cohabitants with people.

“Cars were an invention to improve our lives,” one of my interns commented the other day. “If they make our lives worse, shouldn’t we reconsider why we have them?”

Theoretically, the car constitutes a means of rapid travel. In reality, as automobiles become more prevalent, traffic congestion increases. While the average traffic speed in Dhaka was 21 km/h in 2007, by 2022 it will be only 4.8 km/h. This happens to be the average walking speed. In comparison, a cyclist can easily travel at 30 km/h.

Imagine that you are responsible for allocating road space to different users. On what basis would you award it? Would you give the most to the elites, to the most polluting, bulky, most dangerous vehicles? Or would you try to have a fair distribution based on the number of trips by vehicle mode, with an emphasis on encouraging non-polluting trips and penalizing polluting trips? Certainly, efficient use of road space will factor into your decision.

Looking at the cars packed into the streets of Dhaka, it’s easy to believe that most travel is done by car. In fact, cars represent only a small minority, approximately 11 percent of trips. And yet, cars occupy 70 percent of road space. Pedestrians are lucky to have a narrow path and cyclists do not benefit from any infrastructure.

Traffic jams caused by cars are not just a nuisance; this entails real costs: a loss of 82 million hours of work daily in the capital due to traffic, equivalent to Tk 139 crore.

Would you like to have cleaner air to breathe? Air pollution is much higher on motorized streets than on non-motorized streets.

And yet, Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh are becoming more and more congested, polluted, dangerous and unpleasant. Rather than limiting the number of imported cars and implementing other tried-and-tested restrictions, like charging more for car parking, we actually encourage car ownership through loans, lots of free parking or low cost on the street and insisting that apartment buildings and businesses supply, at exorbitant prices. cost, free parking. The number of private cars registered till 2010 was nearly 2.2 lakh; by June 2020, it rose to over 3.7 lakhaccording to data from the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA). In the same period, motorcycles increased from over 7.5 lakh to nearly 30 lakh. How much longer can we stand?

The authorities predict an ever-increasing use of cars and a real reduction in travel on foot. God forbid!

It all seems inevitable. Cars confer status; as incomes increase, car use will also increase. Those who cannot afford a car will buy a motorcycle, which poses similar problems. And our cities are becoming more and more congested, polluted, noisy and miserable every year. The cars occupy an inordinate amount of space and stubbornly refuse to leave.

And yet, modern cities like Copenhagen, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore show that it is possible to control cars and restore quality of life to cities: less pollution, less noise, more parks and green spaces, better conditions for walking and cycling, and therefore less pollution. congestion. Less space and fewer resources devoted to cars also makes it easier to provide all the other amenities people want and need in cities.

As we celebrate World Cities Day, it is certainly time to significantly restrict the use of private motorized vehicles and make our cities more livable.

Debra Efroymson is executive director of the Bangladesh Welfare Institute.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

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