Towards creating better cities: problems and potentials of transit oriented development as community development tool in Dhaka

Abstract

Peter Calthorpe saw Transit Oriented Development (TOD) as a neotraditional guide to sustainable community design, rather than an excuse for new infrastructure development. Coming to Dhaka, it has become a mega city with more than ten million inhabitants, and its population is projected to reach 16 million by 2015. Lack of sufficient public transport facilities to support this growing demand and efficient transport management paired with increasing automobile dependency resulting into serious traffic congestion in addition to air pollution induced health hazard, reduced productivity and additional stress on city dwellers. Considering this situation the government of Bangladesh has identified priority issues such as improvement of mass transit system (buses and rail transportations). But in spite of all the detail technical guidelines regarding the transit networks, little evidence has been found regarding how the surrounding community is going to be affected or benefited due to this new transit infrastructures and how these changes can be guided. This is where this paper considers to critically investigating the problems and prospects of mass transit system in Dhaka and potential of TOD as a promising concept for strengthening the local communities. The investigation has been based on examining documented evidences such as national guidelines, international case study and informal social survey in one of the busiest influence zones along the proposed mass transit corridors. The findings focus on the positive perspectives of the local community supporting the TOD and some of the policy and institutional barriers that might hamper the benefits TOD application may yield in the context of Dhaka.