On Dhaka's streets, everyone knows the rules -- and everyone knows they don't matter. What should be a system of order has become a marketplace of impunity.
This culture of corruption is not limited to the roadside. It is embedded in how we design, approve, and fund our transport system. Decisions about flyovers, bus routes, or mega-projects are too often made not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of politics, profit, and patronage. The result is predictable: a transport system that fails its people -- by design.
Corruption as the operating system
To understand why our roads are unsafe, we must recognise an uncomfortable truth: corruption isn't an aberration; it is the operating system.
Licences are routinely bought through dalals, often without applicants ever appearing. Vehicle fitness certificates can be purchased for a few thousand taka, no inspection required. On the road, enforcement is equally compromised. A bus jumps a red signal? A small payment clears it. A truck overloaded with sand? A payoff at the checkpoint keeps it moving.
The cost of these practices is not merely monetary. They normalise lawlessness. A driver who has bought his licence and fitness certificate, and bribed his way out of penalties, learns one thing: the rules do not apply. And when rules don't apply, safety becomes irrelevant.
Meanwhile, cheaper, evidence-based solutions -- fixing pavements, building safe crossings, regulating roadside space -- receive little attention. They don't offer ribbon-cuttings. They don't enable inflated tenders. In the minds of decision-makers, what gets priority are the programmes that deliver media spotlight or patronage -- not the ones that most improve daily life and mobility.
The price of impunity
Everywhere in the world, road safety depends on three things: rules, enforcement, and trust. Bangladesh has rules. It even has agencies tasked with enforcement. What it lacks is trust -- because citizens know enforcement is for sale.
This impunity has consequences measured in lives lost. Official figures tally thousands of deaths each year; independent estimates put the real toll far higher. Many are preventable: buses racing each other for trips, or unfit vehicles collapsing in motion. But when penalties are negotiable, safety is sacrificed at the altar of expediency. As one commuter put it: "In Dhaka, you don't drive with a licence. You drive with cash in your pocket."
How projects fail before they begin
Corruption is not confined to individual violations; it shapes the very infrastructure we build.
Consider the endless flyovers and overpasses that sprout across Dhaka. They cost billions, consume years, and create new bottlenecks almost as soon as they open. Why are they pursued? Because mega-projects generate lucrative contracts -- and those contracts funnel money and influence to networks of contractors, politicians, and bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, cheaper, evidence-based solutions -- fixing pavements, building safe crossings, regulating roadside space -- receive little attention. They don't offer ribbon-cuttings. They don't enable inflated tenders. In the minds of decision-makers, what gets priority are the programmes that deliver media spotlight or patronage -- not the ones that most improve daily life and mobility.
New Market, Dhaka Photo: Joisey Showaa/Flickr
Disconnected decision-making
Transport policies are often devised in meeting rooms, far removed from the streets they are meant to govern.
The Dhaka Nagar Paribahan initiative, for example, was launched in 2021 as part of the first Bus Route Rationalisation (BRR) plan. On paper, it was designed as a franchise model to ensure fewer overlapping routes. In practice, it exposed how disconnected policymaking can be. The plan was announced with fanfare but without serious consultation with the bus owners' associations who dominate the sector, or with city corporations responsible for street-level logistics. Implementation stalled almost immediately. Currently, the transport ministry is attempting another round of BRR reforms -- but unless incentives for owners, drivers, and agencies are aligned, history risks repeating itself.
The digital ticketing initiative is another such example. Repeatedly promised since 2016, pilots were launched with publicity but never scaled. Agencies disagreed over procurement terms, data ownership, and revenue-sharing. Even the 2021 Dhaka Nagar Paribahan launch included commitments to include digital ticketing, but by 2025 commuters are still handing over crumpled notes while bureaucrats argue over tenders.
Such disconnect extends to land use as well when we build or extend our road infrastructure. Roads are widened without considering pedestrian flow. High-rises are approved without proper parking provisions, spilling vehicles into already narrow streets. Terminals are sited without last-mile access. One agency's solution becomes another's problem -- and the commuter bears the cost.
Everywhere in the world, road safety depends on three things: rules, enforcement, and trust. Bangladesh has rules. It even has agencies tasked with enforcement. What it lacks is trust -- because citizens know enforcement is for sale.
The syndicate's clasp
Even when there is a sensible plan, a single veto player can derail it: the transport owners' syndicate. These politically connected transport owners function as a cartel. They fix fares, control routes, and resist regulation that goes against their interests.
Their influence is significant. A hint of stricter enforcement brings the threat of strikes that can paralyse the country. In a system where road transport carries the bulk of people and goods, that threat has the force of a veto. The state ends up negotiating not as regulator to the regulated, but as hostage to a power bloc.
Enforcement for sale
Underpaid and overstretched, traffic units often treat violations as opportunities for roadside "settlements." Every violation becomes negotiable cash.
This transactional norm destroys deterrence. If the price of a violation is a bribe rather than a predictable penalty, rational actors will keep engaging in violations. And when citizens see authorities bargaining over safety, they learn a deeper lesson: institutions are not neutral; they are essentially marketplaces. That cynicism corrodes not only traffic behaviour but public trust in the authority itself.
Who benefits from the chaos?
It is tempting to chalk all of this up to incompetence. In reality, it is profitable.
For transport owners, chaos allows maximum trips and minimal regulation. For corrupt officials, chaos creates a steady flow of bribes. For contractors, chaos justifies endless new projects. For some politicians, the sector is a mobilisable voting bloc, and enforcement often "softens" around elections to keep operators on side.
The victims are ordinary citizens. Commuters pay with lost hours. Families pay with lost lives. The nation pays with lost productivity and a tattered social contract.
Students took to the streets to protest traffic incidents that killed a boy and a girl, and injured nine others in Dhaka, in 2018. File Photo
When the state fails, citizens step in
In 2018, students filled the vacuum left by the state, directing traffic and demanding safe roads. Amid the political upheaval and transition of 2024, the students did it again -- a haunting reminder that when the state retreats, it is the youth who step forward and underline the tragic, fatal failures of previous generations.
Why reforms keep failing
Bangladesh is not short on reports or recommendations. Commissions have been formed; strategies drafted; donor-funded projects launched. But reforms falter for two predictable reasons:
• They threaten rents. Any reform that cuts into discretionary power or cartel income faces organised resistance -- and without strong leadership at the top, it collapses.
• They are disconnected. Policies are designed without aligning impetus, compensating for displacement, or coordinating mandates across agencies. What begins as a good idea fails in the gaps between institutions.
This creates a vicious cycle: corruption undermines reforms; disconnected reforms create opportunities for new corruption. The cycle persists, as does the suffering.
We need to break the cycle
If corruption is systemic, reform needs to be systemic as well. Three urgent steps should be considered:
• Transparency in enforcement: detect violations with cameras and collect fines electronically, and make enforcement data publicly available.
• Independent oversight: establish an ombudsman or independent road safety commission empowered to investigate agency misconduct.
• Accountability at the top: when major crashes expose systemic failure, resignations should follow.
These aren't silver bullets. But together they can begin to flip incentives -- from personal discretion to institutional discipline.
In the final instalment, I will argue that this problem has outgrown any single ministry. Only a National Transport Reform Taskforce -- anchored at the very top of government, with legal teeth, transparent metrics, and a plan to build a new road culture -- can break the cycle.
Why this matters
This is not just about traffic jams. It is about the kind of state we inhabit. A country where licences are sold, where policies are written for profit, and where enforcement is negotiable is not facing a transport problem. It is facing a governance crisis that erodes public faith in every institution it touches.
It also shapes culture. When young people see corruption normalised in something as basic as crossing the street, what does it teach them about justice, fairness, or citizenship? What expectations do they carry into adulthood about how power should work?
The road ahead
Bangladesh's roads are killing fields not by accident, but by design. They are formed by corruption and disconnected policy decisions, locked into a state of dysfunction by interest groups. Fixing road safety would require more than new laws or big projects. It would require breaking the political economy of corruption and rebuilding institutions that put safety and dignity above favouritism and profit.
In the final instalment, I will argue that this problem has outgrown any single ministry. Only a National Transport Reform Taskforce -- anchored at the very top of government, with legal teeth, transparent metrics, and a plan to build a new road culture -- can break the cycle.
Sajedul Hoq is a development practitioner and the President of Bangladesh Traffic & Transport Forum. He can be reached at [email protected].
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