Tangail highway stops for 7 hours

Hundreds of vehicles were stuck in a gridlock on Dhaka-Tangail highway for seven hours causing immense suffering to people.

The 30km-long-tailback was seen from Chandra Intersection in Gazipur to Baoikhola in Tangail. The moving traffic came to a complete halt around 4:00am.

The situation started to become normal around 11:00am, said passengers, transport workers and traffic police.

Increased number of vehicles going towards Dhaka since Friday night on a highway being worked on were the reasons for the chaos, said Shahadat Hossain Selim, traffic inspector in Mirzapur.

Madhab Sarkar of Kathalia village in Mirzapur got on a bus in Mirzapur to go to Dhaka around 8:00am. His bus covered only six kilometers in an hour and half. He then gave up and went home, missing a day's work.

Vehicles took an additional three to four hours to pass the 55km stretch between Chandra and Elenga due to the congestion, said Shamol Saha, driver of a bus.

Officer-in-Charge Khalilur Rahman of Gorai Highway Police Station blamed reckless driving and drivers breaking traffic rules for the chaos.

Sajedul Islam, traffic inspector in Tangail, said the highway has a capacity to deal with 5,000 vehicles a day but it is dealing with around 10,000 vehicles.

The congestion and sufferings increase after holidays when pressure of vehicles heading for Dhaka goes up.

The work to upgrade the highway to a dual carriageway began on January 1, 2016. The expansion work is supposed to be complete in December.