BY NBM WRITER
Thanks to the Almighty’s good graces I secured an admission to the Advocate’s Training Programme at the Kenya school of law. That means shuttling between my work station in Parklands and Karen where the programme center, is situated. Some will say that I should concentrate on my academics and rightly so, but shelving work considering all the benefits I derive from it is not an option for me. I’ll just die.
“Should everything pan out as I hope, my routine will be very simple.” I told myself.
“I’ll get up in the wee morning for a jog, prepare myself then catch a bus for town. Considering the traffic, that should take about two hours and as a bonus, whatever remains of sleep will be completed there. I should be at my desk by 8 am, be a good boy and sit out the next six hours in thorough activity before catching a bus again for school. At 4 pm I should be in class taking notes. By 8 in the evening I will be done and at 10 pm I’ll be snoring the night away- my mind somewhere in the Santiago Bernabeau watching the indomitable Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro.” I was in for a rude shock.
So recently I made my first afternoon trip, to try out the routine but most importantly, to go pick my letter of admission. I got to school shortly past 5 pm, having begun my sojourn at 2 pm! But for the fact that the lady administrator falls in the rare class of dutiful Kenyans who stay behind past business hours, I would have missed my letter. Suddenly I was thinking, would I be in time for my classes leaving town at 2 pm as intended?
To get to the Karen Shopping Center from the City Center one uses Langata and Ngong roads which alongside Jogoo road are undoubtedly the busiest in Nairobi. Ideally this journey should take some 40 minutes, but not so. If one opts for the mellow old school buses during the rush hour, this time could stretch to three hours. And that is on a good day! On the hip matatus, the manyangas, the time reduces significantly yet with guarantee of a nasty headache thanks to the blazing music, the rough and tumble due to overlapping and a mannerless crew. Not only so, Rongai, Karen and Hardy are some of the most expensive routes in the city. Ceteris paribus, prices range between Sh80 and Sh100. Slight showers though and the fare doubles!
And there are no alternatives. Whatever the route, snarl ups, loud music and exorbitant prices are the order of the day and at some point one will have to join Ngong road where things worsen with single carriage way. Contrast this with residential estates along Jogoo road, Donholm, Umoja, Tena and Buruburu, for instance. Although there is traffic, there is at least comfort in a quiet ride depending on the bus one decided to take. There are also several alternative routes. One is likely to arrive on time depending on their intelligent application of vector analysis. What’s more, there are the diesel trains. They may be prone to congestion and the wagons on some of them may be falling apart but they are also affordable and timely. There are no traffic jams. To get to Donholm for example, one could do so via Jogoo road, Likoni road, Buruburu, Mombasa road or even Eastleigh, they could also take the Kayole or Komarock buses – many different vehicles belonging to various saccos and charging different prices. Better yet, for a small sum of Sh40, one could take the train.
I see road expansion works going on in the city, but why can’t we have trains, subsidized short distance commuter trains like there are in Germany or private passenger trains as they are in Japan? Ongata Rongai and Karen need this.
The biggest cause of traffic congestion is the presence of too many cars on the road due to inadequate mass transit options. Government may be doing all it can to expand the road network but this effort will always be defeated without a concerted effort to regulate road population. As it is, the number of vehicles on the road is expanding much faster than the roads are able to accommodate. The menace is also likely to persist as the roads narrow towards the city center where the road network has remained relatively unchanged from the colonial period.
Several ways to kill a rat
Elsewhere, cities have come up with innovative ways of how to reduce traffic congestion. In Stockholm Sweden, private motorists are now charged for venturing into the central city on weekdays between 06.30am and 18.30pm through an electronic road-pricing scheme. Within two years of implementing the programme, traffic had reduced by 25%- the equivalent of about 1 million vehicles every day. Revenues collected have been used to improve other transport and transit services.
Meanwhile in Bogota, certain vehicles are forbidden from travelling the streets at certain times- a practice first introduced in 2000 by then mayor, Enrique Penalosa. Both public and private vehicles are included in the ban based on the last digit of the license plate. The numbers restricted each day rotate on an annual basis.
In India, perhaps due to their family culture, the rule in some cities is that a car must carry at least 4 passengers to be allowed on the road – car-pooling. The idea of father, mother and son driving away to the same destination (often as demonstration of opulence rather than proper time keeping) often witnessed in Nairobi is none existent!
The bicycle is king in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. Hangzhou boasts one of the world’s largest public bike-sharing programmes with 67,000 public bikes, 3,000 service points, as well as an average daily renting volume of 230,000 bikes. Nothing beats a bike for convenience moving around the city. Imagine this system in a city like Nairobi where the madness of driving to the coffee shop across the street from the office exits in abundance!
Zurich and Hamburg have simply frozen parking space within the city center. And when a new space is built off-street, an on-street space must be converted to a side walk or a bike lane. In Copenhagen, where parking spots are removed at a rate of about 32 spots per year, traffic has dropped by 6% since 2005, even though car ownership has gone up by 13%
Instead of bikes and trams, London and Jakarta, Indonesia are shifting focus to cable cars – a culture that Medellin, Colombia has practiced for almost a decade now. Cable cars are quite popular in areas with high terrain. More so, they are being touted as transport systems on their own with the parking stations existing on top of high-rise buildings. Depending on your taste for movies, you might have encountered this trend. Since their introduction in Medellin, travel time has reduced by almost 2 hours.
Transport for London’s online journey planner provides instant advice on routes in the UK capital, with users able to opt for multiple modes of transport, including walking, tube train, bus, over ground train, river transport and bicycle. The key to the success of the integrated journey planner is the willingness of operators to share information and to provide it to the general public. There are also calls to create more HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes which have proven successful in many places such as Houston.
Then there is Singapore. Owning a car here is not for the faint hearted and the “aspiring”. In Singapore, prospective vehicle owners are required to first obtain a Certificate of Entitlement, which can start at $48,000 (Sh4.9m) in local currency for a small-size automobile. Only a specific number of COEs are released each month, part of government efforts to control the number of cars on its roads. The vehicle entitlement is valid for 10 years from the date of registration of the vehicle and the scheme aims to peg long-term vehicle population growth at 3% a year. Those who cough up for the prohibitively expensive system must also pay registration fees and electronic road pricing, a series of congestion tolls that vary throughout the day according to usage. Some estimate that owning a Honda Civic in Singapore can cost more than $100,000 (Sh10.2m).
Investing in public transport remains the best way of taking cars off the road. And while there have been efforts to do just that, they are hardly nearly as innovative and are often stifled by cartels fearful of losing business. Their retrogressive agenda is in the public domain.
The train
Due to their large capacity and convenience when well maintained, trains are without doubt the most efficient means of public transport. The subway system has been employed with so much success in countries like Japan – so much so that quite a number of the rails are privately owned with a huge potential for profit.
A Comeng 6 carriage train is 142 meters long and carries 1,500 people and, which translates to an average of 9cm per person. A single occupant vehicle meanwhile is approximately six meters long and carries one person translating to an average of 400cm per person. This means that it takes a 3km stretch of a dual carriageway to carry the same number of passengers as one train- the distance between the Cooperative House Building along Haile Selassie Avenue and just past Muthurwa Market! Our diesel engines are considerably longer with about 10 carriages!
If it takes these diesel trains approximately 15 minutes (absent the stop overs) to cover the 10km journey from the Railways Station to Donholm in Eastlands, it would take some 30 minutes to travel to Karen Shopping Center, a distance of about 20km. By bus, this could be three hours! Bear in mind also the affordable Sh50 the service will probably charge.
Although subway systems rarely make a profit in the short term, much more can be saved from the considerable reduction in time and natural resource wasted stuck in traffic. They are also needed to relieve congestion and cut pollution.
While adding more lanes to existing highways and building new ones has been the traditional response to congestion alone, this is not enough. As the subsequent diagrams show, Government needs to employ a combination of smart solutions, effective oversight and legislation to effectively deal with the problem. Most urgently however, as the expansion works continue on Ngong and Langata roads, it could consider setting a railway line along the new roads. The land is already there as there are many couches lying unengaged at the railway headquarters.
