Kudos to Ministry of Transport for 50kph; Now drive it down to 10kph!

By Peter Wanyonyi | 9yrs ago | 3 min read

Nduva Muli- Permanent secretary for roads and infrastructure is asked some question by inspector Jacob Otieno after his car was impounded for over speeding along thika road. He was released on bail.PHOTO BY WILLIS AWANDU/STANDARD

Humans are rather ungrateful creatures. Apart from being the only beings with the temerity to question the existence of their very own creator — as if we could simply have appeared from nowhere, just like that - we also hold the distinction of being one of only two species that actually go to war against its own kin, killing them by the bucketful, and then taking over their territories by force.

One thing I have discovered is that humans are nasty when faced with measures that, in all sensibility, make their lives tolerable.

This is why we now hear some unkind souls saying bad things about the speed limits being enforced in certain parts of Nairobi and its environs.

Nairobi traffic

Some clever people have worked out that Nairobi is the world’s fourth most congested city. Nairobi traffic is legendary.

Apparently, our monumental traffic jams cost Nairobians a staggering Sh54 million a day, in lost productivity alone. Mark you this is before one throws in the wasted fuel, frayed tempers and foul-mouthed tirades.

So bad is the traffic that, to get to work on time, our leaders use their privileged outriders and sirens to drive into Nairobi on the wrong side of the road.

One wonders whether this tells our leaders something – but the absence of any meaningful action until now suggests that no lessons have been learnt. Until now.

The good people at the Ministry of Transport have realised just how much of a pain this is, and have come up with a brilliant scheme.

Hidden deep inside Kenya’s traffic laws is one old leftover that limits speeds in the city to just 50 kilometres per hour. When one considers the ironies that make up Kenya’s transport sector, one sees that this law is not out of place.

Speed bumps

Kenya is the only place in the world where superhighways have speed bumps on them. That’s right: on a superhighway designed to get traffic into and out of the city as fast as possible, one finds huge, fat speed bumps accomplishing the exact opposite.

This superhighway also has excellent service roads designed to ensure matatus do not clog up traffic on the main highway.

Unfortunately, matatus ignore the service roads and, you guessed it, proceed to clog up the main highway, just for the fun of it.

The average commute speed in Nairobi is, we are told, a brisk 20 kph. So the busybodies trying to fault the Ministry of Transport really ought to get over themselves and thank the Ministry for effectively more than doubling the speed at which we can crawl into the city.

Ban matatus

But it gets better: all these cars are bad for us anyway. They emit noxious gases that give us diseases, they encourage laziness that sees us growing fat as we twiddle our thumbs on our mobile phones in traffic, and they generally mean that our lives are too comfortable for a poor country on the wrong end of the development scale.

The Ministry of Transport should go further. They should essentially ban matatus from within the CBD.

Our transformation into a walking nation will have astonishing and far-reaching positive effects: no more pollution, obesity effectively halted, money saved that would have been spent uselessly on fuel, and carjackers completely eliminated.

Graduate to bicycles

We might even live up to our reputation as a nation of runners – our rediscovered bipedalism will help us come up to speed with the now-forgotten art of human-powered locomotion.

And then who knows? Maybe in 10 years we can graduate to bicycles in an orderly fashion, the better to create all those bike-assembly jobs and reduce unemployment.

For now, though, the ministry needs to ban motoring for the vast majority of Kenyans — and, for the remaining vehicles on our roads, cut the speed limit down to 10 kph.