Dhaka traffic solution: can shared transport fix it?

Shared transport alone won't fix Dhaka. But it is one Dhaka traffic solution a company can switch on by itself, next month, without waiting for a new flyover. One 10-seat vehicle on a staff route can replace seven or eight private vehicles, motorbikes and ride-hailing trips. Below: sourced numbers, then the math for one route.

How bad is Dhaka traffic, by the numbers?

Most people in Dhaka don't need convincing. But numbers help when you're arguing for a budget. Here are the figures we could check against a published source.

A word of care on these. The speed figure is from 2017, not today. The registration shares and the on-road survey measure different things. One counts papers; the other counts vehicles seen moving. They shouldn't be merged into one number.

What they agree on is the shape of the problem. Dhaka's roads carry a lot of vehicles that move very few people each. Buses, which move many people per vehicle, are a small slice of the fleet.

Why does vehicle count matter more than people count?

A road doesn't fill up with people. It fills up with vehicles. A sedan carrying one manager takes roughly the same lane space at a signal as a sedan carrying four. A microbus carrying ten takes a little more.

So the question for any traffic fix is simple. How many vehicles does it take to move the same people?

Think about a typical office morning at Gulshan 2. The people arriving come in many shapes:

• A senior manager in a private vehicle with a driver.

• A team lead on her own motorbike.

• Three analysts who each took a ride-hailing motorbike.

• Two people who shared a CNG from Badda.

• A handful who came by bus and walked the last kilometre.

Every one of those choices was sensible for that person. Together, they put a lot of vehicles on Gulshan Avenue for a small number of people.

What fixes does Dhaka already have?

There's no single answer, and nobody serious claims there is. The fixes people discuss fall into a few groups.

The top half matters most at the city level. The metro line through Uttara, Mirpur and Motijheel already changed some commutes. But a company can't build a metro line. It can do the bottom half of the table this quarter.

That's the argument of this post. Shared staff transport is not the Dhaka traffic fix. It's the part an HR or admin team actually controls.

What does one corridor look like before and after?

Here is a worked example for one route. The office is in Gulshan 2. Forty staff live in Uttara Sectors 3 to 13. Office hours are 9:00 to 18:00.

All figures are examples to show the method, not survey data.

How do they get to work today?

That's 34 vehicles going south each morning, and 34 going north each evening. Over a 22-day month, it adds up to about 1,500 vehicle trips on one corridor.

What changes with Pick & Drop?

Now it's 8 vehicles each way, not 34. That's 26 fewer vehicles each way, or about 1,140 fewer vehicle trips a month on this corridor alone.

What does it cost the staff?

Commuting costs are personal, so here's one example rider only.

The company pays ৳6,000 for a seat. The rider saves ৳11,000. On this example, the company could even share the cost and both sides still come out ahead. Your numbers will differ, so run them.

Does one company's route change anything?

Not much on its own. Twenty-six fewer vehicles won't clear Airport Road. That's honest.

But Dhaka's office corridors are full of companies. Gulshan, Banani, Tejgaon and Motijheel each hold hundreds of offices. If one office in ten put its biggest corridor on shared transport, the effect on peak-hour traffic would be visible on those roads. Not cured. Visible.

There are also benefits inside the company that don't depend on anyone else:

• Predictable arrival. Staff on a fixed route arrive together, at a known time.

• Less parking pressure. Fewer private vehicles at the building means less fighting over basement slots.

• Safer late exits. Staff who leave at 20:00 have a planned way home.

• A cost per head you can see. Allowances hide what transport really costs. Routes put it on one line.

For HR, those reasons are usually enough. The traffic benefit is a bonus.

What should a company actually do?

Here's a plan that works for most offices with 50 or more staff. It takes about a month.

1. Map where people live. Ask for the nearest landmark, not the full address. Group the answers by corridor.

2. Find the biggest corridor. Mirpur, Uttara and Jatrabari are common in Dhaka. Pick the one with the most staff.

3. Count the vehicles today. Use a one-question survey: "How did you come to work today?" Ask it on an ordinary Tuesday.

4. Price shared transport for that corridor. Use cost per seat, not per vehicle. Our staff transport guide for HR explains the method.

5. Shift start times if you can. Moving a start from 9:00 to 8:30 or 9:30 may avoid the worst of the peak. Test it with one team first.

6. Run it for a month. Track on-time arrival and complaints, and repeat the vehicle count.

7. Add the next corridor. Only once the first is stable.

How do you run the vehicle-count survey?

Step 3 sounds simple, and it is. But a sloppy survey gives you a number nobody trusts. Here's a version that takes five minutes to send and gives you a clean "before" picture.

Pick an ordinary day. Avoid Mondays after a long weekend, hartal days, heavy rain and the week before Eid. A Tuesday or Wednesday in a normal month is ideal.

Send it in the morning, after people arrive. Keep it anonymous, so nobody worries that HR is judging their commute. Use these five questions:

1. Which area did you travel from today? (Pick from a list: Uttara, Mirpur, Mohammadpur, Badda, Jatrabari, other.)

2. How did you travel? (Own vehicle, own motorbike, ride-hailing motorbike, ride-hailing or rented vehicle, CNG, bus, metro, walked.)

3. Did you share that vehicle with anyone from the office?

4. Roughly how long did the trip take, in minutes?

5. Would you use a shared office vehicle from your area if one ran at a fixed time?

Question 5 is the one that matters most for planning. A corridor with 30 staff but only 9 "yes" answers is a smaller route than it looks. A corridor with 15 staff and 14 "yes" answers is a strong first candidate.

Run the same survey a month after the route starts. The change in question 2 for that corridor is your traffic result. The change in question 4 is your commute-time result. Put both in one short note for management.

Where does a marketplace fit in?

Step 4 is where most companies stall. They don't know enough fleets to get a fair price.

On VMS, a business transport marketplace in Bangladesh, the HR team draws that Uttara route on a map and posts it. Approved fleets bid, and the company picks which one to hire. The rest of the process is laid out in how VMS works, and our reasons for building it are in why we're building VMS.

The traffic case doesn't depend on VMS. Any well-run shared route, with any supplier, puts fewer vehicles on the road.

Where could this argument be wrong?

We think shared staff transport is under-used in Dhaka. But a fair argument should name its weak spots.

None of these are reasons to do nothing. They are reasons to design routes well, keep them short, and measure what happens.

What would make the bigger difference?

Shared staff transport works best alongside the city-level fixes, not instead of them. A few things would multiply its effect:

• Bus priority on main corridors. Staff vehicles benefit from any lane that keeps high-occupancy traffic moving.

• Better links to metro stations. A short shared route to a metro station can beat a long one to the office.

• Office clusters agreeing on staggered hours. One building moving its start time helps a little. A whole road doing it helps more.

• Parking that reflects its true cost. Free parking quietly encourages one person per vehicle.

Companies can push for some of these through their business chambers and building associations. They can do the shared route themselves.