Key Jatrabari Road choked by illegal structures

The Jatrabari Road, linking the capital with the country’s southern and eastern districts has been choked by illegal constructions.
As traffic movement on the key road faces obstructions at different points drivers often are left with no option but to use the Mayor Mohammad Hanif Flyover by paying toll.
The key road is dotted with over 500 shops, several garages for keeping rickshaw-vans auto-rickshaws, party offices, mosques, and restaurants, all illegally opened by locally powerful people.
Two out of four lanes of the important road remains close to traffic at most points due to the illegal encroachments, regular users told New Age.
They said that too wide medians around the piers of the flyover also facilitated the encroachments to block traffic movement, as the authorities take no steps to remove the encroachers.
The 11-km flyover, the country’s longest, stretches from Nimtoli to Kutubkhali via Gulistan and Jatrabari.
BUET’s civil engineering professor and director of its road safety institute Shamsul Hoque said that the key road, below the flyover, does not facilitate free traffic flow as it should as it has been choked by illegal structures built by encroachers.
Too wide medians for the protection of short piers of the flyover also narrowed down the road below it, he said.
But he said there is no scope to reduce the width of the medians now.
A top road safety expert, Shamsul Hoque expressed doubts that the medians’ widths were deliberately designed to encourage drivers to use the flyover to increase toll collection.
Sayedabad Terminal Bus Owners’ Association president Abul Kalam said that the flyover did not improve traffic flow on the road below as it was expected.
He, however, did not deny that the flyover users were finding their journeys much better now.
Failure to repair the badly damaged key road for long and illegal parking on it, also obstructs traffic flow causing long tailbacks on it, said drivers.
Bank executive Ashik Alam said it takes 15 minutes to reach Gulistan from Jatrabari to commuters using the flyover but the journey could stretch to an hour by the road below.
During a visit, New Age found solid wastes heaped around the medians for constructing illegal structures on the raised spaces.
DSCC chief waste management officer Air Commodore Shafiqul Alam said that four secondary waste transfer stations were under construction by the city corporation below the flyover.

Traffic flow on the key road is also obstructed by two garbage transfer stations of the DSCC, a mosque, a mazar, at least 80 shops and a fish market all near the Jatrabari Bus Stand.
Besides, a makeshift fish market with around 300 shops and timber stored by sawmills on the road also cause round the clock traffic jam on the important road.
The chief estate officer of DSCC Mohammad Kamrul Islam Chowdhury said that reappearance of encroachers rendered evictions ineffective time and again.
Orion Group safety and traffic officer Naif Uddin Khan said they built the flyover according to the design approved by the government.
‘If the city corporation wants to modify it without damaging flyover structure, we will cooperate with them,’ he said.
On October 2013 the flyover was opened to traffic.
Mayor Mohammad Sayeed Khokon said that Dhaka South City Corporation took a plan to remove the ‘obstacles’ made by the flyover contractor.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net