The long weekend on the back of last week's Durga Puja holiday has now sparked a 3-km long tailback at Goalondo’s Daulatdia ferry terminal on Sunday evening, as hundreds of vehicles with holidaymakers kept waiting to cross the river on their way back home.
The long line of slow-moving vehicles crossed the Daulatdia canal ghat area on the Dhaka-Khulna highway, as some of the passengers complained about being stuck for more than three hours in the afternoon, reports UNB.
The pressure of Dhaka-bound vehicles at Daulatdia point was compounded from Sunday noon with the addition of a large number of Muslim devotees heading toward Faridpur’s Atrashi Darbar Sharif for Eid-e-Miladunnabi, said Firoz Ahmmed, terminal supervisor of Lalon Paribahan bus service from Kushtia.
Many of the passengers said they were heading towards Dhaka to join their workstations after the Durga Puja Holiday.
Alamin Sheikh, a bus passenger returning to Atroshi from Faridpur, said that he was a part of a team loaded in three buses from Gazipur on Saturday night to observe Eid Miladunnabi at Atrashi.
“I started to return to Gazipur at Sunday noon and remained stuck here since then,” he said.
At least 180 such vehicles returning from Atroshi also remained stuck in the long traffic.
There are 16 small and big ferries on the Daulatdia-Paturia route but only 10 of them are operational and the rest are kept in the floating factory at Paturia as there was a lack of traffic after the inauguration of Padma Bridge, said Md. Salah Uddin, Daulatdia office manager, Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA)
Amid the increased pressure of vehicles due to the holiday and Eid-e-Miladunnabi from Sunday afternoon, we may make all the 16 ferries operational if necessary, he said.