Renowned civil engineer Dr M Shamim Z Bosunia approached The Daily Star with an innovative plan to solve the capital’s traffic problem last Wednesday, in which he designed an expressway providing for a far greater use of railway land.
He designed the expressway following the same route of the currently planned expressway, on the same land and along the same rail track. However his simple engineering solution creates scope for a far greater traffic movement along with provisions for apartment buildings that helps to address the housing crisis in the city.
Although we know that the government is at the final stage of awarding the expressway construction job, we still thought that it is worthwhile to bring Dr Bosunia’s ideas to the public domain, because land is an extremely precious commodity in Dhaka city and once we use this land under the present plan, opportunity for a more efficient use of this extremely scarce resource will be lost forever. Dr Basunia’s idea is based on optimum utilisation of Dhaka city’s land.
Therefore, we have decided to give a full page (Page-12) display today to Dr Bosunia’s ideas in the hope that policy makers will look at it and make a judicious decision which will impact on Dhaka city’s future in a fundamental way.
