dhaka
Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, is mired in traffic chaos every day. Anyone who moves through the streets by car spends a lot of time in traffic jams. But now there is an alternative: the first metro in the metropolis goes into service.
A metro system is intended to help combat the major congestion problem in one of the most densely populated capital cities. Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has now inaugurated the country’s first metro system in the metropolis of Dhaka. “This metro will bring dynamism to the national economy,” said the 75-year-old. “It will help save time and money that would otherwise be lost in daily traffic.”
More than 20 million people live in the capital Dhaka. The city is known for its bad traffic jams. According to the World Bank in 2018, the average driving speed there fell from 21 km/h in 1980 to 7 km/h. Around 3.2 million working hours were lost in the city every day due to traffic jams.
Now the partly Japanese-financed metro is scheduled to open to the public on Thursday (December 29). So far, the rails are almost twelve kilometers long, it said. In the coming year, around ten more kilometers should be added and more metro lines will follow later.
