Traffic worsens on highways

Traffic is crawling on the Dhaka-Aricha highway and at the various bus stands in Savar as people begin to move out of Dhaka for the Eid holidays. Home-bound people began gathering at the bus stands of Ashulia industrial area and Savar from Friday morning trying to catch long-distance buses. Our correspondent in Savar saw long traffic tailbacks in Aminbazar and Radio Colony area to Nabinagar, and from Baishmail to Noyarhat area caused mostly by buses stopping anywhere on the roads and picking up passengers. Traffic has also ground to a halt on the Baipail-Abdullapur highway starting from from Ashulia Bazar and on the Nabinagar-Kaliakair highway from Ashulia DEPZ bus stand to Chandra. Passengers of a Bogra-bound bus from Dhaka said they left from Gabtali at 8:30am and reached Radio Colony at 9:15am. From there it took them almost an hour to cross Nabinagar, which is roughly eight kilometres away. Hundreds of home-bound people are stuck due to long tailback of vehicles on Dhaka-Aricha highway/DHAKA TRIBUNE Savar Traffic Police In-charge Abul Hossain said all factories in the industrial area were closed for Eid at the same time, leading to the immense pressure on the roads.

Bottlenecks at Meghna, Gumti Bridge

Our Munshiganj correspondent reports that on both sides of the Meghna Bridge and the Gumti Bridge in Gazaria on the Dhaka-Chittagong Highway, traffic has come to a complete stop. While the highway was upgraded to four lanes, the two key bridges remain two lane, leading to a pair of bottlenecks within 13km of each other. Kanchan Chowdhury, a local, told the Dhaka Tribune that police were trying to avoid gridlocks by letting one lane of traffic onto the bridges at a time. Gazaria Police Station Officer-in-Charge Hedyaet Bhuiyan said the police were trying their best to keep the traffic flowing smoothly if not fast through the two bridges. “Because the bridges are narrow, there is no viable solution to this jam other than bridge expansion. But we are trying our best – 120 policemen have been assigned to the highway,” he said.