Within six years of completion of the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway, a fresh move has been taken to upgrade the country's main economic corridor to a standard regional highway for accommodating its increasing traffic.
Sources said the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) has finally taken the move to carry out a feasibility study to upgrade the 231-kilometre highway from Dhaka to Chattogram, and do detailed design of the country's main artery.
Nearly 90 per cent of the country's export-import goods are transported through the corridor due to its link between the Chattogram Port and capital Dhaka.
As maintaining the highway has become hard with increasing traffic, the study would also help the RHD to get rid of its daily maintenance, which has been carried out since two years of the work completion in July 2016 due to substandard work, they added.
The RHD would also do detailed design of the road to ensure all facilities for a regional highway.
Following the experience of the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway, the RHD has so far completed feasibility study of nearly 2,500 km national and regional highways since 2015.
Despite the poor standard of the highway, the RHD refrained from upgrading it. Rather, the agency demanded nearly Tk 10 billion maintenance cost from the Planning Commission, showing the cause of not controlling the overloaded vehicles, resulting in damage of the road from day one.
The RHD finally got Tk 7.40 billion project approval in 2019 to carry out maintenance work of the highway.
"Other than repairing the highway, the RHD has done nothing to make it a standard one, while the agency has taken various highway upgradation projects," said one official.
However, officials said a study and detailed design was carried out to develop access control highway on the corridor under public-private partnership (PPP) initiative. But it was shelved by the government high-ups after two years of work due to involvement of high cost.
A section of the government high-ups also felt no immediate need of the access control highway on the corridor due to not facing any traffic congestion after completion of its first four-lane project.
The RHD sources said a new feasibility study and detailed design of the highway would now be carried out under third phase of the study project titled 'Road transport connectivity improvement project preparatory facilities'.
The RHD completed study and design work of 1,759 km road network in the first phase, and 590 km in the second phase since 2015.
The third phase of the project would conduct feasibility study and detailed design for upgrading 1,711 km road network, which would mostly connect with land ports and sea ports.
The study would find out traffic demand of the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway first and then would complete design to make it a standard one, as the existing road has already turned poor due to heavy traffic.
Sources said under the project, alternative roads of the corridor would also be studied to lessen pressure on the highway, as all vehicles laden with export and import goods use the corridor.
The first Dhaka-Chattogram four-lane project was taken in 2005 and its construction began in 2011. Due to various problems in carrying out the construction, it took six more years to complete the work. The cost of the project increased to Tk 34.39 billion from Tk 16.99 billion.
