Festival Time Transportation Demand Modeling in Bangladesh

Every year about 9.5 million people leave Dhaka to their village home for celebrating Eid festivals with their family which is about 63% of the total population of Dhaka. But due to the insufficient transport facilities, these homebound people suffer a lot. This fact has prompted this research where the demand of homebound people has been calculated through sequential demand forecasting modeling (after conducting a survey among 2000 people) and been compared with the present capacity and hence some solution approaches have been suggested for meeting the demand. From our research it has been found that about 7 hundred thousand people go to Rangpur division, 14 hundred thousand to Rajshahi, 9.6 to Khulna, 7 to Sylhet, 26 to Chittagong, 6 to Barishal and 23 hundred thousand people go to other parts of Dhaka division from Dhaka city. From mode choice modelling it has been found that mode choices of homebound people are dominated by Bus, Launch and Trains (32%, 34% and 23% respectively). This mode choice varies according to people’s income, travel time and mostly to the destination. After finding the demand, it has been compared with present capacity. It has been found that the total demand of Rangpur division is 5 times more than the present capacity. Similarly, Demand to capacity ration for Rajshahi is 4, for Khulna is 3, for Sylhet 5, for other parts of Dhaka division 2.5, for Chittagong 5 and for Barishal, it is 2. A suggestion has been given at the end to manage this short time high demand situation by increasing capacity and availability of railways at the end.