There is something profoundly disturbing about a country that spends thousands of crores of taka building a transport system, fails to put it into operation after more than a decade, and then decides to spend another fortune dismantling what it has built.
Bangladesh’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project, intended to ease the journey between Dhaka and Gazipur, has reached precisely this point of absurdity.
After years of construction, repeated delays and mounting public frustration, the government has decided to remove the project’s stations and lane dividers, convert the corridor into a six-lane highway, and wind up the company established to operate the service.
The demolition alone is expected to cost Tk 45 crore, with another Tk 27 crore proposed for road safety measures.
Meanwhile, the materials recovered from dismantling the stations are estimated to fetch just Tk 7 crore.
This is more than a failed transport project. It is a disturbing illustration of how public money can be spent without anyone appearing to bear meaningful responsibility for the consequences.
The tragedy of the BRT project is not simply that it failed. Development initiatives sometimes fail because of technological limitations, changing circumstances or genuinely unforeseen obstacles.
The deeper problem is that this failure unfolded over years, through repeated extensions and escalating costs, without an effective mechanism to prevent the disaster from becoming progressively more expensive.
The project was approved in 2012, with construction expected to finish by 2016 and passenger services to begin in 2017. Yet the promised buses never arrived, even as the deadline was extended five times.
A project conceived to save commuters time instead consumed years of their lives. Its infrastructure occupied valuable road space, disrupted commercial activity and turned an already difficult journey into an exhausting daily ordeal.
The original estimated cost of Tk 2,390 crore eventually rose to Tk 4,268 crore, an increase of approximately 79 per cent.
The reported cumulative expenditure of Tk 2,811 crore represents roughly two-thirds of the revised budget, yet the central objective of carrying passengers through a dedicated rapid transit system remained unrealised.
The government must now decide how to recover the corridor from the consequences of its own development experiment.
But converting the route into a six-lane highway will not erase the financial and human costs accumulated over the preceding 14 years.
What makes the BRT debacle especially revealing is the apparent separation between spending money and delivering public benefits.
A development project is often judged by its approved budget, physical progress and the number of structures erected.
Yet the public does not benefit from concrete pillars, passenger stations or lane dividers simply because they exist. Infrastructure acquires value only when it performs the function for which it was built.
A railway line without trains, a hospital without adequate medical services or a transport corridor without buses cannot be considered successful merely because construction has consumed a substantial budget.
The BRT project exposes the danger of treating physical construction as a substitute for functional planning.
The government intended to introduce a dedicated bus service along a route of approximately 20.5 kilometres between Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport and Shibbari in Gazipur.
But the transport system was never merely a collection of stations and designated lanes.
It required suitable buses, operational arrangements, passenger access, integration with existing transport networks and coordination among the institutions responsible for delivering the service.
These were not peripheral considerations that could conveniently be addressed after construction. They were essential components of the project itself.
The reported problems with bus procurement and station design are particularly troubling.
Plans for long buses with automatic doors did not materialise, and a later initiative to procure electric buses also failed.
A subsequent tender for 137 air-conditioned diesel buses did not result in their acquisition either.
Meanwhile, the station design reportedly assumed buses with doors on the right, despite conventional buses in Bangladesh generally having passenger doors on the left.
Such inconsistencies raise a fundamental question: how could a transport system progress so far towards construction without resolving the basic requirements of the vehicles expected to use it?
This is not merely a technical oversight. It reflects a broader weakness in development planning, where different components of a project can advance without sufficient assurance that they will eventually function together.
Roads are constructed before transport services are secured; buildings are completed before operational requirements are settled; and substantial expenditure occurs before the practical feasibility of the entire system is adequately demonstrated.
When these failures finally become impossible to ignore, the public is presented with a fait accompli: abandon the original plan and spend more money correcting its consequences.
The decision to abandon the project may nevertheless be the most practical option available.
A technical review by a team from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology recommended cancelling the BRT system and using the existing corridor as an improved highway.
Continuing to pursue a fundamentally flawed plan merely because considerable money has already been spent would compound the original mistake.
Public policy cannot be guided by the emotional desire to justify previous expenditure when the expected benefits are no longer achievable.
However, abandoning a failed project and absolving those responsible for its failure are entirely different matters.
The government should not confuse the need for a practical solution with the need to investigate what went wrong.
If converting the corridor into a highway is the most sensible option, the decision must be accompanied by a transparent assessment of planning failures, procurement decisions, design inconsistencies, administrative coordination and repeated deadline extensions.
Citizens deserve to know why a project with such an important public purpose could not deliver its principal service after so many years and so much expenditure.
Accountability must also extend to the proposed demolition. The estimated Tk 45 crore cost of removing the stations and lane dividers, together with the additional Tk 27 crore sought for road safety, requires independent technical and financial scrutiny.
The projected Tk 7 crore recovery from dismantled materials should be assessed transparently.
Authorities must explain how these estimates were calculated, what materials can be reused and whether any existing infrastructure can be retained safely and economically.
The objective should be to minimise further losses, not to create another expenditure programme whose necessity and implementation escape meaningful public examination.
There is also a larger question about the country’s approach to urban transportation.
Widening a highway may improve traffic flow temporarily, but more lanes alone cannot guarantee sustainable mobility.
If the number of private vehicles continues to increase while public transport remains unreliable, additional road capacity can eventually be consumed by growing traffic demand.
Gazipur needs an integrated transport strategy that connects industrial areas, residential communities, Dhaka and regional destinations through dependable buses, rail services and accessible interchange facilities.
The proposed commuter train connection between Gazipur and Kamalapur deserves serious consideration, particularly as railway expansion on the route approaches completion.
The immediate task is to restore movement, but the long-term objective must be to move people efficiently rather than simply accommodate more vehicles.
(Writer: An Academic, Journalist, and Political Analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT. He can be reached at nazmulalam.rijohn@gmail.com)