Kenya: Mass Transit Solution

opinion

By Mike Ngwalla

illustration image - tomorrowspaper.wordpress.com

More than anything else in the transport sector, the city of Nairobi now needs a mass transit system to take care of the rapidly growing population and its need to travel to various destinations within the metropolitan area. The most useful system would certainly be an underground rail network like those that exist in many other large cities around the world.

The lack of a proper mass transit system in Nairobi is currently a very costly deficiency that wastes lots of money and money, while at the same time causing not easily quantifiable mental and physical distress to millions of people every day.

It is often an unmitigated disaster when one makes an appointment to meet someone in Nairobi at any given time during the day. The traffic jams on the roads and streets are simply nerve-wrecking.

One day in 2009, my friend and journalistic colleague Mr. Kwendo Opanga and I were driving in his car towards the Nairobi city centre from Vision Plaza about half a kilometer before the Panari Hotel along the wide multi-lane but often busy Mombasa Road. Our actual destination was the Nairobi Club in the Upper Hill area of where we had an appointment with one of the senior ministers in the coalition government at 6.00pm.

We left the office at around 4.00pm believing that two hours would be enough for us to drive comfortably to our destination at the Nairobi club, about six kilometers away and still have some time to spare. Under normal circumstances the journey should have taken less than half an hour and just a litre or less of the super petrol the car was using. After driving just a short distance from Vision Plaza, however, we encountered one of the major traffic jams for which Nairobi has now become infamous. It was a major pile up of moving vehicles that actually never moved.

As we inched slowly forward with numerous long stops, by 6.00p, we had only driven for one and a half kilometers to the Belle Vue area of Mombasa Road. It was all so frustrating as we kept in touch with the waiting minister at the Nairobi Club by cell-phone and updated him on our progress. By around 7.00pm, we were still stuck in the traffic jam around the Nyayo Stadium area and the car was indicating that it was running out of fuel by the time we reached the Mombasa Road/Lusaka Road roundabout.

Luckily for us there happens to be a petrol station just around the Mombasa Road/Lusaka Road roundabout and we had to make a detour there in order to purchase some fuel for the car. My friend Mr. Opanga had to cough up Ksh. 2,000 from his wallet for the fuel as the car required enough fuel, not only to take us through the hellish traffic jam along Mombasa Road to our Upper Hill destination, but also to drive himself to his Rongai residence on the southern outskirts of the city, after our meeting with the minister.

We eventually reached the Nairobi Club at 8.15pm as the minister, who had waited for us patiently during our traffic ordeal, was preparing to depart. A journey that should have taken less than a half hour had taken more than four hours and Ksh.2,000 in additional fuel.

The frustrated minister had waited for more than two hours for us to arrive at the Nairobi Club. We had a little chat for about five minutes and agreed to reschedule our meeting to another day in his office in Treasury Building on Harambee Avenue within Nairobi's central business district (CBD).

More recently in 2012, a female journalist from London in the United Kingdom had travelled to Nairobi and scheduled six different interviews in one day. In the mistaken belief that traffic movement in Nairobi would be similar to that in London, she had made arrangements to hire a vehicle and travel to all the six different parts of our City in the Sun for the interviews.

To the immense chagrin of the foreign journalist,, however, she could only manage a couple of interviews as she got stuck in Nairobi's notorious traffic jams. She even arrived very late for those two interviews she could make out of the six planned, after sitting impatiently in the hired car for several hours while waiting for the traffic to move. Even more appalling was the fact that she had to pay much more for the hired car.

These two incidents, about four years apart, clearly indicate that despite the recent construction of several spectacular superhighways and overpasses in and around Nairobi by Chinese companies, almost nothing appears to have changed in the movement of traffic within our City in the Sun. The driving habits of both private and public transport vehicles in the city remain exactly the same as frequent traffic snarl-ups impose a totally frustrating commuting regime to both residents and visitors.

The number of pedestrians and vehicles using the city's streets, roads and avenues is growing rapidly and some drastic steps must be taken in order to avert a total traffic chaos within the next few years

As a rapidly expanding metropolitan centre, with a current population estimated at 4.5 million, Nairobi now needs to urgently devise other means of transport to cope with the growing human and vehicle traffic. Plans are already being made to rehabilitate the rail systems that exist and build new ones, but it is taking such a long time to make these transport projects a reality as Nairobians and visitors continue to suffer from traffic jams.

Source: Allafrica