NO WAY AROUND: A STRIKE, A BUS RIDE, AND THE MAKING OF DHAKA’S FIRST MAP
TEAM MEMBERS AND ORGANIZATIONS THAT MAPPED DHAKA:
ALBERT CHING, Research Lead and Master’s Student in Urban Planning, MIT Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART)
MUNTASIR MAMUN, Local Project Lead, Founder, Kewkradong Bangladesh, Electrical and Electronic Engineer
SAAD BIN HOSSAIN, Field Researcher & Volunteer Coordinator, University Student, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering
CHRIS ZEGRAS, Principal Investigator, Professor of Mobility and Urban Planning at MIT. Lead Principal Investigator, SMART Future Urban Mobility Interdisciplinary Research Group.
STEPHEN KENNEDY, Map Designer, Master’s Student in Urban Planning at MIT
ALBERT CHING, Research Lead and Master’s Student in Urban Planning, MIT Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART)
MUNTASIR MAMUN, Local Project Lead, Founder, Kewkradong Bangladesh, Electrical and Electronic Engineer
SAAD BIN HOSSAIN, Field Researcher & Volunteer Coordinator, University Student, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering
CHRIS ZEGRAS, Principal Investigator, Professor of Mobility and Urban Planning at MIT. Lead Principal Investigator, SMART Future Urban Mobility Interdisciplinary Research Group.
STEPHEN KENNEDY, Map Designer, Master’s Student in Urban Planning at MIT
When the city of Dhaka ground to a halt during a weeklong strike in 2010, it revealed an unsettling question: how do people move through a city where nothing seems to move at all? On a normal day, thousands of buses crisscross the capital, ferrying millions of residents across its crowded streets. But even then, no one really knows where those buses go, how they connect, or how long a trip might take. There wasn’t a map—not on paper, not online. In one of the most densely populated cities in the world, public transportation was a vital system hidden in plain sight.
At the time of the strike, Dhaka was home to more than 10 million people, living in an area smaller than New York City’s five boroughs. It’s one of the most densely populated cities on Earth—more crowded than Cairo, and more chaotic than Mumbai.
That question of how people actually get around in cities like Dhaka was precisely what brought Albert Ching, Urban Planning Researcher at MIT, to Bangladesh. As part of a regional research initiative supported by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, Albert had set out to understand how emerging technologies might shape the future of mobility across Asia. Cities like Singapore and Tokyo had sleek transit systems. But what about Dhaka, where mobile phones were arriving before motorcars, and where informal transport ruled the roads?
Albert arrived in the middle of the strike, marooned in a hotel and warned by staff not to go outside. It was, ironically, the perfect place to witness a system in crisis—and to wonder if there was even a system at all.
He soon met Muntasir Mamun, an electrical engineer and local organizer known for leading cycling expeditions and mapping treks across Bangladesh. Muntasir had no formal role in government, but he had an intimate understanding of Dhaka’s streets, shaped by years of daily commutes and grassroots activism through his community organization, Kewkradong. “When I heard someone from the U.S. wanted to study our transport and was staying in a hotel in my city,” Muntasir recalled with a laugh, “I told him: you have to go out on the road.”
Within 20 minutes of meeting, they boarded their first bus together—and launched what would become Dhaka’s first citywide bus mapping project. With a team of university students, volunteers, and informal planners, and no official support or funding, they set out to do something no government agency had done before: make the city’s invisible transit system legible.
SWEAT EQUITY, SMARTPHONES, AND THE SLOWEST COMMUTE ON EARTH
To call Dhaka’s bus system chaotic would be generous. Buses operated without fixed stops, signage, or schedules. Commuters relied on a web of hearsay and instinct to get around—asking chaiwalas, or conductors, where to go, or simply memorizing routes by trial and error. The system served mostly the working class and students, people who couldn’t afford cars and relied on public transit to navigate a city buckling under its own density and congestion.
For Saad Bin Hussain, then a university student and Muntasir’s longtime friend, the bus wasn’t a research subject—it was his daily struggle. “My university was just 10 or 11 kilometers from home,” he said. “But it used to take two hours or more each way.” Like so many others, his time disappeared into traffic.
The team—Albert, Muntasir, Saad, and a growing crew of volunteers—realized early on that even mapping the system would be a logistical nightmare. Mobile technology was just emerging in Dhaka. Most people didn’t own smartphones. Even sourcing enough Android devices for data collection required scouring local distributors and persuading Samsung to lend them a few dozen handsets.
Every day, volunteers rode buses from dawn to dusk, logging routes, asking passengers about their commutes, and collecting data through an app that Albert had built from scratch. “We spent hundreds of hours just sitting on buses,” Muntasir said. “It was exhausting—but it worked.”
Their efforts revealed more than just routes. They uncovered patterns that hadn’t been quantified before: the city’s average commuting speed was just 6.5 kilometers per hour—barely faster than walking. And gender disparities in access to mobility became obvious: as buses grew more crowded, women all but vanished from the ridership.
“This was about more than just transit,” said Albert. “It was about who gets to move freely in the city.”
At the time of the strike, Dhaka was home to more than 10 million people, living in an area smaller than New York City’s five boroughs. It’s one of the most densely populated cities on Earth—more crowded than Cairo, and more chaotic than Mumbai.
That question of how people actually get around in cities like Dhaka was precisely what brought Albert Ching, Urban Planning Researcher at MIT, to Bangladesh. As part of a regional research initiative supported by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, Albert had set out to understand how emerging technologies might shape the future of mobility across Asia. Cities like Singapore and Tokyo had sleek transit systems. But what about Dhaka, where mobile phones were arriving before motorcars, and where informal transport ruled the roads?
Albert arrived in the middle of the strike, marooned in a hotel and warned by staff not to go outside. It was, ironically, the perfect place to witness a system in crisis—and to wonder if there was even a system at all.
He soon met Muntasir Mamun, an electrical engineer and local organizer known for leading cycling expeditions and mapping treks across Bangladesh. Muntasir had no formal role in government, but he had an intimate understanding of Dhaka’s streets, shaped by years of daily commutes and grassroots activism through his community organization, Kewkradong. “When I heard someone from the U.S. wanted to study our transport and was staying in a hotel in my city,” Muntasir recalled with a laugh, “I told him: you have to go out on the road.”
Within 20 minutes of meeting, they boarded their first bus together—and launched what would become Dhaka’s first citywide bus mapping project. With a team of university students, volunteers, and informal planners, and no official support or funding, they set out to do something no government agency had done before: make the city’s invisible transit system legible.
SWEAT EQUITY, SMARTPHONES, AND THE SLOWEST COMMUTE ON EARTH
To call Dhaka’s bus system chaotic would be generous. Buses operated without fixed stops, signage, or schedules. Commuters relied on a web of hearsay and instinct to get around—asking chaiwalas, or conductors, where to go, or simply memorizing routes by trial and error. The system served mostly the working class and students, people who couldn’t afford cars and relied on public transit to navigate a city buckling under its own density and congestion.
For Saad Bin Hussain, then a university student and Muntasir’s longtime friend, the bus wasn’t a research subject—it was his daily struggle. “My university was just 10 or 11 kilometers from home,” he said. “But it used to take two hours or more each way.” Like so many others, his time disappeared into traffic.
The team—Albert, Muntasir, Saad, and a growing crew of volunteers—realized early on that even mapping the system would be a logistical nightmare. Mobile technology was just emerging in Dhaka. Most people didn’t own smartphones. Even sourcing enough Android devices for data collection required scouring local distributors and persuading Samsung to lend them a few dozen handsets.
Every day, volunteers rode buses from dawn to dusk, logging routes, asking passengers about their commutes, and collecting data through an app that Albert had built from scratch. “We spent hundreds of hours just sitting on buses,” Muntasir said. “It was exhausting—but it worked.”
Their efforts revealed more than just routes. They uncovered patterns that hadn’t been quantified before: the city’s average commuting speed was just 6.5 kilometers per hour—barely faster than walking. And gender disparities in access to mobility became obvious: as buses grew more crowded, women all but vanished from the ridership.
“This was about more than just transit,” said Albert. “It was about who gets to move freely in the city.”
A BEAUTIFUL MAP FOR AN UNMAPPED CITY
For all its ambition, the team’s goal remained remarkably modest: build a map. But in a city where even the bus drivers didn’t always know their own routes, that modest goal was radical.
Chris Zegras, Albert’s advisor at MIT and a key supporter of the project, recognized the project’s potential early on. “Developing a map could be revolutionary,” he said. “It sounds small—but visibility changes everything.”
Designed by MIT classmate Stephen Kennedy and released in 2014, the map was more than functional. It was art: “So beautiful that nobody believed it was from Dhaka,” Muntasir said. “If the font wasn’t Bengali, people would think it was from Tokyo or Berlin.”
The map was released online and instantly captured the public’s imagination. In an age before smartphones were ubiquitous in Bangladesh, a printed version became a kind of urban talisman—a proof that someone had taken the time to understand the city. The team’s Facebook posts reached tens of thousands. For Dhaka’s residents, it offered something more powerful than directions: dignity. It showed that the millions of people who took the bus every day deserved the same tools and care that riders in any global capital received.
TOO EARLY, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Despite its success, the project never received formal institutional backing. When the team piloted a live bus-tracking system using mobile phones—a workaround for expensive GPS systems—drivers pushed back, wary of being tracked. And although the government eventually expressed interest and supported a second phase, the work remained mostly outside official channels.
In the years since, other efforts to digitize Dhaka’s transit system have stalled. A dataset by WhereIsMyTransit, a leading company mapping informal transit data into a standardized format, was completed in 2020 by a mapping company contracted by Google, but the release was indefinitely delayed by the pandemic. The map remains, in many ways, the most visible artifact of Dhaka’s hidden transit system.
Looking back, the team wonders what might have been if the work had come a few years later. “We were too early,” Muntasir said. “Now people would benefit even more.” Today, Dhaka has added a metro line and expressways, but the average speed of traffic has improved only slightly. Most of the city still depends on buses—many of them still without clear signage, stops, or digital routing.
WHAT THEY BUILT—AND WHAT THEY LEARNED
The bus map project may not have transformed the system overnight, but it changed something else: the people involved. A decade and a half later, the team remains close. They still talk. They still remember the routes. The relationships that formed during the mapping process—between researchers and riders, MIT students and Dhaka locals—are, perhaps, the project’s most lasting infrastructure.
Chris keeps the map framed in his office. “What makes me proud is not just the result—it’s the way it happened,” he said. “We didn’t come in with the answers. We learned together.”
Albert Ching puts it more simply: “It wasn’t just a map. It was a way of saying: we see you.”
For all its ambition, the team’s goal remained remarkably modest: build a map. But in a city where even the bus drivers didn’t always know their own routes, that modest goal was radical.
Chris Zegras, Albert’s advisor at MIT and a key supporter of the project, recognized the project’s potential early on. “Developing a map could be revolutionary,” he said. “It sounds small—but visibility changes everything.”
Designed by MIT classmate Stephen Kennedy and released in 2014, the map was more than functional. It was art: “So beautiful that nobody believed it was from Dhaka,” Muntasir said. “If the font wasn’t Bengali, people would think it was from Tokyo or Berlin.”
The map was released online and instantly captured the public’s imagination. In an age before smartphones were ubiquitous in Bangladesh, a printed version became a kind of urban talisman—a proof that someone had taken the time to understand the city. The team’s Facebook posts reached tens of thousands. For Dhaka’s residents, it offered something more powerful than directions: dignity. It showed that the millions of people who took the bus every day deserved the same tools and care that riders in any global capital received.
TOO EARLY, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Despite its success, the project never received formal institutional backing. When the team piloted a live bus-tracking system using mobile phones—a workaround for expensive GPS systems—drivers pushed back, wary of being tracked. And although the government eventually expressed interest and supported a second phase, the work remained mostly outside official channels.
In the years since, other efforts to digitize Dhaka’s transit system have stalled. A dataset by WhereIsMyTransit, a leading company mapping informal transit data into a standardized format, was completed in 2020 by a mapping company contracted by Google, but the release was indefinitely delayed by the pandemic. The map remains, in many ways, the most visible artifact of Dhaka’s hidden transit system.
Looking back, the team wonders what might have been if the work had come a few years later. “We were too early,” Muntasir said. “Now people would benefit even more.” Today, Dhaka has added a metro line and expressways, but the average speed of traffic has improved only slightly. Most of the city still depends on buses—many of them still without clear signage, stops, or digital routing.
WHAT THEY BUILT—AND WHAT THEY LEARNED
The bus map project may not have transformed the system overnight, but it changed something else: the people involved. A decade and a half later, the team remains close. They still talk. They still remember the routes. The relationships that formed during the mapping process—between researchers and riders, MIT students and Dhaka locals—are, perhaps, the project’s most lasting infrastructure.
Chris keeps the map framed in his office. “What makes me proud is not just the result—it’s the way it happened,” he said. “We didn’t come in with the answers. We learned together.”
Albert Ching puts it more simply: “It wasn’t just a map. It was a way of saying: we see you.”