Berth Capacity Grew. The Road to Dhaka Didn't Keep Up.
Why the real schedule risk for Dhaka-bound cargo increasingly sits inland, not at the port gate.
All the talk about Bay Terminal and Patenga adding berths misses half the actual bottleneck. A container can complete Customs formalities and leave the jetty promptly yet still sit in a truck queue for hours, because the road and rail capacity moving cargo between Chittagong and Dhaka hasn't kept pace with what the port itself can now handle. Queue position, berth prospect, permissible draft (confirm with current CPA/pilot guidance for date and LOA), pilot boarding and cargo-working conditions can change with the latest CPA notice, tide, traffic, equipment, labour and receiver readiness.
Why the inland leg is the part nobody fixed
Traffic surveys going back over a decade already showed the two-lane sections of the Dhaka-Chittagong highway running at saturation, with up to 40% of vehicles being trucks. Forecasts at the time projected motorised traffic climbing from around 35,000 vehicles a day in 2020 toward 119,000 by 2040 on some sections, and even the four-lane upgrade work was projected to hit its own saturation point by the early 2020s under mixed traffic conditions. None of that capacity math has fundamentally changed just because the port side added cranes and gantries.
Rail's share hasn't grown the way planners wanted
Bangladesh's port master planning has explicitly flagged the need to dramatically increase rail's share of Dhaka-bound container traffic, precisely because road alone can't absorb the growth. That hasn't materialized at the pace hoped for, rail infrastructure investment has lagged the same way it has across most of the country's transport network, and most container cargo destined for Dhaka and beyond still ends up on a truck rather than a wagon, regardless of how much cheaper or more reliable rail would theoretically be for that corridor.
The Access-Controlled Expressway is the one project actually meant to fix this
A planned Access Controlled Dhaka-Chittagong Expressway was identified years ago as adding meaningful capacity, modeling at the time suggested it could add the equivalent of 2.5 million TEU of practical handling capacity just by removing the existing highway's bottleneck. Coordinated planning across Bangladesh Railway, the Roads and Highways Department and BIWTA was flagged as essential precisely because none of these pieces work in isolation, more port capacity without matching inland capacity just moves the congestion fifty kilometres inland instead of solving it.
What this means for cargo planning today
If your cargo's final destination is Dhaka or further north, the honest schedule risk increasingly sits in the inland leg rather than at the port gate, a container that clears the jetty cleanly can still spend longer in a highway queue than it spent waiting for a berth. For time-sensitive cargo, it's worth asking specifically about rail or ICD-routed options rather than assuming road transport by default, particularly during peak congestion periods or monsoon-affected road conditions.
Planning Dhaka-Bound Cargo from Chittagong?
Send vessel name and IMO number, LOA, beam, arrival draft, cargo and gear details, ETA and intended berth or anchorage. The duty desk will report the current queue, permissible movement window and any separate lighterage, terminal or survey requirement.