Abstract:
Peter Calthorpe saw Transit Oriented Development (TOD) as a neotraditional
guide to sustainable community design, rather than an
excuse for new infrastructure development. Coming to Dhaka, it has
become a mega city with more than ten million inhabitants, and its
population is projected to reach 16 million by 2015. Lack of sufficient
public transport facilities to support this growing demand and efficient
transport management paired with increasing automobile dependency
resulting into serious traffic congestion in addition to air pollution
induced health hazard, reduced productivity and additional stress on
city dwellers. Considering this situation the government of Bangladesh
has identified priority issues such as improvement of mass transit
system (buses and rail transportations). But in spite of all the detail
technical guidelines regarding the transit networks, little evidence has
been found regarding how the surrounding community is going to be
affected or benefited due to this new transit infrastructures and how
these changes can be guided. This is where this paper considers to
critically investigating the problems and prospects of mass transit
system in Dhaka and potential of TOD as a promising concept for
strengthening the local communities. The investigation has been based
on examining documented evidences such as national guidelines,
international case study and informal social survey in one of the busiest
influence zones along the proposed mass transit corridors. The findings
focus on the positive perspectives of the local community supporting the
TOD and some of the policy and institutional barriers that might
hamper the benefits TOD application may yield in the context of Dhaka
