An Assessment of Battery Operated Auto Rickshaw’s Impact: A case study in Rangpur city, Bangladesh

Battery operated auto-rickshaw is a common three-wheeled fast-growing vehicle in Rangpur city. This paper describes the social, economic, environmental impact and shows the purposive comparison of solar-based auto-rickshaw within the battery oriented auto-rickshaw in the area of Rangpur city. In this work, various questions were asked to the auto-rickshaw drivers, passengers, and importers for acquiring the total scenario of social and economic condition of auto-rickshaw. And for the environmental impact different data were collected from the power supply authorities of Rangpur city. The findings say that the number of auto-rickshaw was 400 in 2012 which has risen in the number to 6,500 in 2019 to a great extent which is the cause for reducing unemployment problem in accordance with increasing traffic jams. The findings of the study also contain that the economic and social condition gets improved by the owner of battery-operated auto-rickshaw whereas the rented battery-operated auto-rickshaw driver is not getting improvement as much as the owner of the auto-rickshaw but both having enough income compared with their previous profession's income. And only 32.5% drivers consider that there is less social value for the profession. Auto rickshaw has no sound pollution, but it is creating trouble by consuming electricity, which is produced by burning fossil fuel and are the cause of continuous air pollution. And according to the field survey total of 21,800 auto rickshaw runs every day in the Rangpur city which is consuming 19.62 megawatts of electricity where the production of electricity is limited as well as it is the cause of both shortage of electricity and 9810 kg emission of carbon per day. But the shortage of electricity and emission of CO2 could be reduced or mitigated by using solar oriented auto rickshaw.