Foreign Transport experts prefer construction of monorail instead of underground metro rail for Dhaka city as the subways will be less feasible and will cost one billion dollar more than the sky-trains.
They said approximately 2.6 billion US dollar will be required to build the country’s underground metro railway but will cost one billion dollar less to build monorails high over the ground.
This was estimated by the urban transportation expert team of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), involving in conducting the feasibility study of setting up the first metro rail line aiming at reducing the huge tailback on the road of capital Dhaka.
“The underground route will cost more as we have to make it firmly waterproof considering acute water-logging problems of Dhaka city security concern is another risk factor for the underground system in Dhaka,” Senior Transport Adviser of JICA Tamaoki Watanabe told BSS on Friday.
Tomaoki said there is common concept that the government needs to acquire lots of land for building the over ground metro link but only some land in Gulistan area will be needed to acquire for setting up the over the ground railway track.
He said JICA is now finalizing the feasibility study of the proposed metro line from Uttara to Saidabad via Pallabi, Farmgate and Shahbagh which will be handed over to the government by next February,” He said Japan government would actively consider to provide concession loan with 0.01 percent interest with 40 years of repay period, if the Bangladesh government request for it after getting the feasibility study.
“I think the financial assistant won’t be a problem for Bangladesh to setting up the metro line as presently Japan government is providing such support in setting up metro railways in Vietnam and Indonesia,” he said.
According to the feasibility study, it would take about five years to build the proposed 22 km first metro line in the city that requires 25 MW power to run.
The carriages will ply over single line at 40 km per hour speed with every four minutes intervals accommodating 64,000 passengers at a time at both directions touching 16 stations.
The feasibility study team is also working to project the fare of the metro line, he said, adding, we will propose such fare that won’t be higher than the existing bus ticket. He said Bangladesh government needed to provide huge subsidy to make the fare tolerable for the common people. “It’s a common practice allover the world to provide subsidy in metro lines like Delhi, Kolkata, Bangkok even Tokyo metro railways,” he said.
Senior Programme Manager of JICA Suman Das Gupta said as per JICA’s Master plan of Dhaka Urban Transport system, conducted from April 2009 to March 2010, three metro lines should be built in Dhaka by 2025 including other two Gabtali to Saidabad and Circular line via Gulshan-Badda-Dhanmondi.
“We have chosen the Uttara-Saidabad link as the first metro line from considering the expected demand and impact of ending road traffic congestion,” he said.
As per the master plan, the passenger demand of the proposed first line, Uttara to Saydabad, is nearly 47 lakh passengers per km which reduces the traffic volume in a rate of 17,88,000 vehicle trips per km.
JICA is conducting the feasibility study at a cost of one million US dollar under its technical cooperation scheme to Bangladesh, Gupta said.
