Somewhere in the linguistic transfer between English and Bangla, the imported word “van” lost its original reference to a sturdy vehicle of transportation with a cab and enclosed cargo area, powered by an internal combustion engine. It also lost a lot of RPM. The Bangladesh “van” is a tricycle with a seat for the driver and a short flat bed. It’s the low-cost and low-emission utility transport found everywhere from country roads to crowded urban highways.
You can carry almost anything on it—cattle fodder and sugar cane, sacks of rice and vegetables, a basket full of live chickens or a couple of goats, household furniture, metal pipes, bamboo scaffolding poles or your family of six. The van has no gears (and perhaps no brakes), making for tough pedaling with a heavy load on the back. Fortunately, most of Bangladesh is as flat as a pancake so the main challenges are the potholes, speed bumps, and trucks and buses that careen wildly across the road, forcing the van chalaks (drivers) onto the dirt berms.
Van chalaks in Old Dhaka
There’s an upscale motorized version of the three-wheeler van with a longer bed. Most are home-made, with a tiller engine—the kind used for irrigation pumps—adapted to provide power. These are used for transporting bricks, lumber and building materials. You can fit two cows, a stack of tires and mattresses, or a couple of beds and tables on the motor-van. Or a couple of families.
Traffic hazard—a slow-moving motorized van defies a High Court ban to transport bamboo on the Dhaka-Sylhet highway. Courtesy The Daily Star.
Any road trip in Bangladesh is a study in the social hierarchy of transportation. Next up from the motor-van is the three-wheeled auto-rickshaw, often referred to by its fuel source as a CNG (Compressed Natural Gas). It doesn’t move much faster than a motor-van, especially when it’s carrying five or six passengers, a couple of them hanging precariously out of the sides of the cab. Then there are Chinese-made pick-up trucks with narrow beds and cabs so tiny that you’d think there was a height and weight limit for drivers. The passenger cars are mostly made in India: models of Tata, Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra SUVs, and foreign brands, manufactured under license—Isuzu, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Opel, Renault and others. The Indian industry also dominates the commercial vehicle market—Tata and Ashok Leyland trucks and Mahindra tractors. And finally, there’s the king—or rather tyrant—of the road, the bus. They come in many forms—from sleek, air-conditioned luxury vehicles to stifling, exhaust-belching claptraps with broken windshields, torn seats and panels and long scrape marks that would challenge the best body shop to knock into shape. The roughest-looking vehicles are often the ones with the fanciest names—the “International Super Express” and the “All the Way First Class Bus.” They all go too fast.
I can’t decide whether it’s more terrifying to watch a bus speed along, swerving wildly to avoid other vehicles, or to be a passenger in the bus itself, taking your life in your hands. I’ll assume that passengers are either inured to danger, resigned to their fate, reciting prayers or heavily sedated. The buses, some with passengers sitting on the roofs, relentlessly charge ahead, their horns blaring, with the driver’s assistant, usually a skinny teenager, hanging out of the door, waving at slower and smaller vehicles to move aside. I don’t think bus drivers are culturally more inclined to reckless maneuvers than other drivers. The problem, according to my UNICEF colleague Yasmin Khan, is that bus companies operate on low profit margins and insist their drivers make so many trips per day; knowing they will get stuck in traffic at some point, they hit the gas when traffic is moving, and other vehicles had better move aside. The brightly painted trucks join in the discordant chorus of horns—some monotone, some playing annoyingly repetitive short melodies. With almost every vehicle using its horn, it’s difficult to figure out who’s getting in the way of whom.
The government has embarked on an ambitious road-building program, widening two-lane roads into divided highways, but high population density and rapid economic growth place severe strains on the network. Several studies have shown that the road system is totally inadequate for the traffic it carries, but shortage of funds and corruption have left many major highways, especially in rural regions, in disrepair. In monsoon season, roads and bridges are washed away, and traffic faces long detours. The highways also take a heavy pounding from overloaded vehicles. Trucks are piled high with bricks, building materials and agricultural produce, lashed down with ropes; often the tailgate is left open, so that the load hangs a foot or so off the back of the bed. When a truck is loaded high, the center of gravity shifts upward, making the vehicle liable to tip over if the driver turns sharply to avoid oncoming traffic.
The combination of fast-moving buses, trucks and cars, slow-moving bicycle and motor-vans and auto-rickshaws, and animals—goats and cattle—on two-lane roads is a recipe for accidents. Twice, the Bangladesh High Court has banned bicycle and motor-vans from national highways, while allowing them to operate on local roads. The ban has gone largely unenforced. Van drivers will not take local roads if the shortest distance between two points is on the national highway.
No one knows exactly how many vehicles are on the roads because perhaps as many as 1.5 million are not registered. In 2017, according to the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA), about 3.42 million vehicles were registered. The same agency reported only 1.7 million driver license holders—in other words, one for every two registered vehicles. Except among government ministers and the business elite, multi-vehicle households are rare. Adding in the number of unregistered vehicles means that almost two thirds, or more than three million, could be driven by unqualified drivers. The country has only 142 BRTA-approved driving instructors and fewer than 100 training centers, with long waits for training and licenses. Most people learn to drive from family members, friends or co-workers.
Transportation experts identify several reasons for accidents. Although some drivers are naturally reckless or lack training, congestion can make even a good driver take unnecessary risks. Some vehicles are poorly maintained; non-technical translation—no brakes. And then there’s that distinctively Asian and African practice of setting up a market or food stall on the highway itself. Economically, it’s a smart move because the stall is in the right place to, so to speak, catch the passing traffic. Narrowing the roadway without warning, however, increases the risk of accidents. Sometimes the passing traffic catches the stall, or another vehicle.