Flexible time for office

By Mehadi Shameem, Free School Street, Dhaka
9 December 2005, 18:00 PM
Traffic jam is a common experience for every person who has to use the streets of Dhaka city everyday. Unfortunately, it increasing tremendously. We know about some reasons that cause traffic congestion. These are huge population of over one crore, ever increasing number of motor vehicles, massive urbanisation, rickshaws and buses with different speeds plying in same road, lack of sufficient roads and highways etc. Undoubtedly, these are general causes that create the jam. But, we have to control the jam in a different way until we are able to solve the above mentioned problems.

We note than Manhattan with an area of 8.5 sq miles can accommodate millions of people. People live and work in on average 80 storied buildings located all over this tiny place. Tokyo, Mumbai, New York, Beijing etc are mega cities. However, they don't have traffic jam like ours. We agree that half of the people in a mega city of a developed country travel using tube railway or metro, and the other half uses roads often with flyovers on the ground. Construction of underground railway (tube railway) is a dream we may never fulfil as a poor country. But, how about flexible time for office goers?

Each mega city has a flexible time for office goers besides the latest human transportation systems like tube railway, flyovers, one way roads, latest traffic signals, good number of highways and so on. We afford to allow flexible time for private office-goers specially working in our vital garments sectors. In fact, workers of some readymade garments industries now work in night shift. Banks and other associated offices can be opened at night. It also matches to an extent with the international working hours. In this way, one group of people work at night and sleep in day time and the other group attend usual daytime offices. We guess it will work. Evidently, we feel comfortable in going outside of our homes in the weekend (holiday) when there's almost zero traffic jam.