AL rally leaves city traffic in disarray

City dwellers on Monday suffered heavily on roads due to traffic gridlock and scarcity of public transport from the morning, because of a ruling Awami League rally and movement of VIPs.
Elderly men and women were forced to walk on roads with hundreds of people because of the congestion. Hundreds of city dwellers also waited on roads for a long time because of scarcity of public transport.
Sources at the Dhaka Metropolitan Police said the flow of vehicle movement on roads was disrupted from Monday morning as the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, joined the weekly cabinet meeting at the secretariat in the morning, and the AL rally in the afternoon.
Samdani Khondoker, a leader of Sarak Paribahan Owners’ Association in Dhaka, said the number of public
buses on the city roads was lower as a good number of them were engaged in bringing AL activists to the rally, leading to a scarcity of buses.
Fifty-five-year-old Jamila Begum, waiting at the city’s Atish Dipankar Road at around noon, said she and her 10-year-old grandson could not get on any airport bound bus for almost an hour as buses were jam-packed and few and far between.
The congestion turned severe when several thousand AL activists started to come to the Suhrawardy Udyan in ward-wise processions to join the rally to mark the historic March 7 speech of the country’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Following the rally and processions, vehicular movement on the road stretching from Shahabagh to Matsya Bhaban was stopped for several hours from around 2pm.
As a result, adjacent areas including New Market, Gulistan, Paltan, Elephant Road, Dhanmondi, Shyamoli, Mirpur, Karwan Bazar, Farmgate, Segunbagicha, Kakrail, and Moghbazar were hit by heavy traffic congestion.
People, who set off from the city’s Gabtali, Uttara, Banani and Gulshan, at times needed even three hours to reach Motijheel and its adjacent areas.
After office hours at 5pm, homebound people faced difficulties finding buses because of the gridlock.
The congestion, however, started to ease from the evening.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net