805 EMERGING ROLE OF EASY BIKE IN KHULNA CITY: CONTRIBUTION TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY N. Anjum * Urban and Rural Planning Department, Khulna University, Khulna, Bangladesh. E-mail: nafisaku2012@gmail.com *Corresponding Author ABSTRACT Sustainable urban transportation is a crucial aspect in order to ensure the growth and development of any city. Khulna as the third largest city of Bangladesh is far behind to achieve transport sustainability. The improper provision and management of public transport in Khulna city, has led dependency on easy bike. At present, in Khulna city; around 17,000 easy-bike are in active service, which fulfils about 65% of the transport demand. The increased popularity and the ever-increasing transportation demand results in an excessive and uncontrolled number of easy bike within the city, which results in traffic congestion and accidents. Because of these degrading impact of easy-bike, it’s role towards sustainability is hardly discerned. Through proper policy formulation and implementation, efficient management and regulated operation; easy bike can be promoted as an effective mode of public transport towards sustainability. Therefore, this study aims to identify the contribution of easy-bike towards sustainability through identifying its’ existing route, network and coverage along with its operational service and also recommend some measures towards the efficient management of easy bike as a sustainable public transport within Khulna city. Keywords: Easy-bike; Operational system of easy bike; Sustainable transportation INTRODUCTION In the contemporary world the major cities of developing countries have experienced numerous transport related challenges including pollution, congestion, declination of public transport, energy depletion and lack of accessibility for the urban poor. Study reveals that, in 2002 only 32% people of Khulna city owns personal vehicles and other 68% of the total households had no vehicle of their own (Rahman, 2004). It is now become a major concern to the contemporary urban planners and policy- makers across the world to alleviate these problems in order to ensure urban sustainability (Pojani and Stead, 2015). Khulna, being a major city of Bangladesh with rapid urbanization has to face different challenges regarding proper transportation system to address social, economic and environmental sustainability (Afroze et al., 2010). The transportation system of Khulna city, which is characterized by both public and private transport, often failed to address sustainability. The modal shift of private to public transportation can be a very effective measure to address sustainability along with to reduce road accident, traffic congestion and pollution (Rahman and Kabir, 2011). Public transport is known as a shared passenger transport available for use of general public, and is shared by strangers without any private arrangement. Although the available public transportation of Khulna city includes different motorized and non-motorized vehicles including town service buses, easy bike, auto rickshaw, rickshaws, vans; recently this city is highly dominated by easy bike. However, because of the mismanagement and unavailability of town bus service people of Khulna city often prefer rickshaw or auto rickshaw as an alternative of bus, although the fare is higher than that of bus (Siddique, 2010; Rahman and Kabir, 2011). Over the time rickshaw was also failed to retain its 4 th International Conference on Advances in Civil Engineering 2018 (ICACE 2018) 19 –21 December 2018 CUET, Chittagong, Bangladesh www.cuet.ac.bd