Potholes, poverty and lost time: The real cost of driving in Bangladesh

Greater Dhaka, now a megacity of around 20 million people, has been ranked the slowest city on Earth. Photo: TBS

At dawn in Dhaka, the horns begin before the muezzin's last note has faded, a ragged brass choir that will keep time all day. By nightfall, when freight trucks finally lurch free of the capital's choke points and head for the delta's hinterland, an average of 88 Bangladeshis will have died in road crashes. 

Each fatality—one every 17 minutes—cleaves a family's finances so deeply that one in eight bereaved households crosses the poverty line the very week the bread-winner is buried. On paper the country is a South-Asian success: per-capita income has quadrupled since the mid-1990s, school enrolment nudges 97% and life expectancy tops 73 years. Yet progress is wheeled along roads so lethal, so slow, and so fragile that they erase much of the gain.

The damage begins with time, the one resource too precious to lose. In rural floodplains, a single cloudburst can turn a clay track into thigh-deep sludge, closing the only route to school. Education ministry surveys show that roughly 22% of primary pupils miss at least a week of class every monsoon; for girls in the char and haor lowlands, the figure jumps another 19% because parents will not send daughters to wade five kilometres in mud or cling to the back of a lorry. A childhood of erratic attendance matures into a lifetime of lower wages, exactly the poverty trap the nation has spent three decades trying to escape.

Public-health penalties follow the same rutted path. When a pregnant woman lives beside a paved surface, the odds that she completes the World Health Organisation's recommended four prenatal check-ups stand at 72%; the moment the pavement ends, that probability collapses to 46%. In the wet season, an ambulance in Kurigram or Sunamganj needs 42 more minutes to reach a hospital than it would in January, a delay trauma physicians link to a 14% spike in otherwise preventable deaths. Ill-built roads, in short, turn curable injuries into funerals.

They also spoil crops and shrink farm prices. A World Bank baseline for the Rural Transport Improvement Programme found that surfacing a mud lane cut farm-gate milk rejection by 36% and raised producer prices for rice by up to 14% within two harvests—an extra $190 a year for the typical smallholder, roughly four months of food. Multiply that across 22 million agricultural households still marooned behind sub-standard links, and the countryside forgoes about $4 billion in crop value every year. Poverty in Bangladesh is increasingly concentrated in such places, less a matter of land than of the road that passes it by.

Urban Bangladesh pays a different bill. Greater Dhaka, now a megacity of around 20 million people, has been ranked the slowest city on Earth; a nine-mile drive from the airport to downtown can take 55 minutes even at midnight, evidence that bad geometry, not just congestion, governs speed. The Accident Research Institute at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology puts the annual cost of collisions, gridlock and vehicle repair at roughly $6.5 billion—about 5% of GDP—and estimates that Dhaka alone devours up to eight million work-hours every day. Average peak-hour speed on major arteries now slips below 5 km/h, slower than a rickshaw. The city's idling traffic burns an extra 920 million litres of fuel a year, adding nearly a billion dollars to the import bill and 2.4 million tonnes of avoidable carbon to the sky.

Why, then, are the roads so weak? Begin with arithmetic. Of Bangladesh's 369,000-kilometre network, only about 110,000 kilometres—30%—are paved, a share not much higher than Haiti's and less than half of Vietnam's. Safety is grimmer still: an Asian Transport Observatory audit in 2025 found that barely 2% of the network reaches a three-star safety rating for pedestrians, and 5% for cyclists. Maintenance money is missing in action. The Roads and Highways Department says it needed roughly Tk94 billion for routine upkeep last year but was appropriated only 38 billion, leaving more than 2,100 kilometres of pavement in "poor or very bad" shape. Overloaded trucks do the rest, inflicting the damage of 9,600 legal vehicles every time a 40-tonne axle rolls by.

Corruption adds its own predatory tax. Transparency International estimates that almost a third of rural-road funds leak away in bribes or fictitious work; nationwide, procurement graft may skim 2% of GDP—enough to treble the maintenance budget and still finance two Padma Bridges each decade. Climate is the coup de grace. Sixty percent of the network lies in flood-prone zones, yet fewer than one-third of those roads meet the agency's own clearance standard. In 2022, monsoon torrents scoured 1,800 kilometres of asphalt into rice paddies and rivers, forcing a rebuild that released 210,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas just to restore what should never have failed in the first place.

Yet when political will, engineering discipline and transparent management align, Bangladesh demonstrates it can pave a future worth driving. The 6.15-kilometre Padma Bridge, opened in 2022 at a self-financed cost of $3.6 billion after donors withdrew, is expected to add up to 1.5 percentage points to GDP by halving travel times for 21 southern districts. On a humbler scale, a donor-backed feeder-road programme upgraded 4,100 kilometres of village links and built 3,200 small bridges; within five years, farm-to-market travel time fell 40% and household income rose as much as 16%. Even grass-roots ingenuity joins the ledger: when a one-kilometre stretch in Tangail washed out last July, villagers pooled rice, raised cash and filled potholes themselves, shaming local officials into completing the work.

The reforms required are not new, merely neglected. Double the maintenance budget and lock it in a dedicated road fund, and the share of bad pavement would sink below three percent within five years, saving 220 billion taka in deferred reconstruction. Install 60 weigh-in-motion stations and automatic fines, and axle-overloading could fall 70%, extending pavement life by a third and saving half a billion dollars annually. Mandate five-year contractor warranties and random lab tests of every 500-tonne batch of asphalt; quality control would cost just 0.3% of project value and cut defect rates to single digits. Move all bidding online—Indonesia's shift to e-tendering shaved 12% off bid prices—and the savings could pay for shoulders, footpaths and rumble strips able to halve national crash deaths to 15,000 by 2030, preserving 85,000 lives and $10 billion over the decade. Raise low-lying rural roads by half a metre and twin the drainage, and the extra 12% in build cost would pay for itself within three monsoons. For cities, a network of 350 smart traffic signals—price tag: $50 million—could lift Dhaka's average speed from 10 km/h to 18 km/h, freeing $1.4 billion in annual productivity and cutting 200,000 tonnes of carbon.

Taken together, these interventions yield a four-to-one benefit-cost ratio. Every dollar spent on disciplined maintenance, axle-load policing, climate-smart engineering and corruption control returns four in saved lives, bigger farm profits and faster freight. By 2035, Bangladesh could run a 75% paved, largely crash-safe network for under 1.5% of GDP—half the economic drain imposed by today's neglect.

All infrastructure is autobiography: it tells the story of a nation's beliefs about itself. Bangladesh is the state that beat river blindness, stitched itself into the seams of global fashion, and lifted tens of millions from destitution. It built the Padma Bridge against the advice of sceptics and the warnings of financiers. Mending its roads is not a moonshot; it is housekeeping, the mundane arithmetic of asphalt and axle weight. Yet no reform would spread opportunity faster or more fairly, touching every journey to school, every market day, every ambulance siren at midnight. Development, after all, is not a destination. It is a road. Whether that road remains a minefield of potholes and grief or becomes the smooth, resilient ground on which 170 million citizens can move, trade, learn and live longer is now a question of budgets, of engineering—and, above all, of political resolve.

The writer is a postgraduate student in Autonomous Vehicle Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.