Bureaucracy, Knowledge and Traffic Congestion in Bangladesh

This is a bit like sampling I suspect, but I happen to think that the World Bank’s blog on South Asia is magnificent.  The breadth of intellectual and informed discussion supported by logic and empirics is wonderfully awe inspiring. Well, certainly to me, if no one else.  But I’d suggest that if you read this blog, you might gander over to at the World Bank’s South Asia blog.

Zahid Hussain argues that though civil engineers might build new roads to ease the terrible traffic congestion that plagues the major cities in Bangladesh, it is not necessary that such a move will indeed ease the problem’s associated with traffic.  It is just as important that the bloated bureaucracy that runs these engineering programs be competent and capable, to deal with the numerous jurisdictions and points of public contact necessary to yield an outcome that, all else being equal, is efficient.  His point: all else is not equal.

He writes:

“One of the vexing problems taxing the taxpayers is the never ending encounter with what we call systemic bureaucratic ineffectiveness. It leaves citizens totally flabbergasted — the perennial problem of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. The list of little things is long, such as when one well-meaning functionary explains with authority what certain regulation requires of the interested citizen only to find that another equally well-meaning functionary provides a divergent interpretation of the same regulation.”

“Often, it is more than these little things which are the bane of the public here in Dhaka. This systemic bureaucratic ineffectiveness is frequently manifested in atrocious outcomes causing serious disruption to the public, not to speak of large economic losses. Yet, even when things go horribly awry because the relevant administration is so out of it, the officials who should have prevented such problems in the first place seem to go scot free.”

Hence if some relevant piece of information suggests that narrowing three lanes to two at a certain bend in the road might create long bottle-necks, it might be best to not build the planned road, though other arguments might defend its construction.

Mr. Hossain, however, under-argues how this kind of bureaucratic and informational stickiness could actually yield less efficient outcomes that the status quo, which as he argues is pretty bad to begin with.  This is because not only do roads not relieve traffic congestion permanently, but instead temporarily create new pathways between two points, the relative ease of travel through which creates new demands on its use. (So that in time, a new equilibrium is reached and traffic in that new road and in the region as a whole again, becomes gnarled.) But rather constructing roads is extremely costly and building a bad one is much worse, than letting things be.

When building roads, the public invests scarce money and energy.  Invariably it has to take up precious land that might otherwise have been put to more productive uses and returns.  Now though logically, congestion is halted or slowed if the growth of roads–and its attendant costs–supersedes the growth of traffic, this is not likely to happen.  But if whilst building that road relevant information is dismissed, then building that road might actually, perversely, increase the problem of traffic congestion while costing the public sector far too much than had not a single shovel dug into the ground.

How often, might one think, does this happen in Bangladesh and other, similar, or poorer countries?