BOX 28.3
Cycle rickshaws and traffic congestion in Dhaka, Bangladi, Bangladesh
The teeming streets of Dhaka are being brought to a standstill by a boom in the number of cycle rickshaws, which offer the only means of travel through the business district that is marginally faster than walking. Seventy per cent of vehicles in the Bangladesh! capital are tricycle rickshaws, with their motorised cousins - 'baby taxis' in local parlance - claiming another 15 per cent. Cars inch through this melee at the mercy of rickshaw wallahs, whose aim is erratic. Buses and lorries move hardly at all. The government is trying^to impose controls, but
nothing in Bangladesh works quite as it should. about 90,OOO cycle rickshaws have licences, fitted to the backs of the vehicles like number plates; the other 300,000 or so use fake plates. Rickshaw pullers earn no more than £2 a day, but it is enough
to attract the rural poor into town. By their mid-thirties most are too worn out to work. The one blessing is that Dhaka is as flat as a table