The Bridge, the economy & the solutions

Most of us believe that a bridge is important right now for our development. Maybe all the political parties also want a bridge between Male’ & Hulumale.  Political parties will propose a bridge because they think most of the voting population is in male’ & that it will win the votes of all these people. Ordinarily people may find that it will solve all the problems of housing & congestion. Others might believe that big bridges & things are signs of developments & landmarks.

I don’t agree with any of the above views. I am totally against it. Again one of the main reasons is that we don’t need to waste so much of resources at this critical stages on such a stupid thing. Yes some are saying it will be done by a commercial company & they will recover their investments through toll system.  If it’s a viable business its true there will be investors. With some simple business calculations most us can say that it’s not viable. Here are my figures

Total Investments $ 150,000,000

Mrf        =                             1,927,500,000

If to recover in 10 years the annual cash inflow from bridge should be total investment divided by 10 years. Which is 19,275,000, per year.

Cash flow needed per day is 19275000 divided by 365 days, which is 5,280,821

So how much of toll can we charge & how many people will use the bridge?

Assuming that the Toll rate is Rf500 & that 5000 people will use the bridge daily, we will still get Rf2,500,000, which is only about 50% of whats needed.

Now we all know for sure that most commercial companies will not be interested to invest in projects that don’t pay back soon.

We all know that we will not pay Rf500 to use the bridge.

Maintenance & interest rates of such a bridge will be very high, maybe we can only recover daily maintenance only.

Now let’s say we got the bridge for free. Wow. A presidential candidate was able to make a bridge for us from all of his savings or just manage to get it as a free gift from their foreign alliance.

Does this mean we got all the solutions to housing & development? Building a bridge between male & hulumale, & providing housing to another 50000 people in hulumale means, we are creating a bigger economic problem.

We all know male’ is not a small island, but male’ is small when all the people in Maldives have to live in male’. Again the same thing will happen. Instead of diversifying our population throughout the Maldives, we are always trying to create bigger problems. Can we develop other areas of the Maldives if we don’t get enough customers to use the services?  no business will be feasible in the islands when all start coming to male’ instead if we plan in such a way that people moves out of male’ we will be able to develop other areas much easily & faster.

I want better things &services from the island, so that we can one day we can have a choice when it comes were to settle down. Now if we need to a business we come male’ if we need to get a good job we come male’. I am looking forward for a day when I will be able to settle down in some area of Maldives. I should be able to get the options like, should I settle in New York or should I settle down in California or should I settle down in somewhere in Maldives.