By David Mutonyi
Nairobi CBD is a regional hub which houses many organisation headquarters, Government departments and transport termini. I was fortunate to see findings of a short study titled Traffic Management and Decongestion in Nairobi Region funded by the Ministry of Nairobi Metropolitan.
About 30% of traffic problems within CBD are caused by driving around looking for parking. Indeed, interviews of commuters found that 76% of them had reported not reaching their destinations because they gave up looking for parking.
The parking demand is so high that by 9am all street parking is full. Indeed the street parking remains full beyond 6pm especially around the popular entertainment spots.
Street parking is incredibly cheap for such a busy city with very high parking demand. The most interesting finding for me was that 73% of street parking spaces benefit only 3,050 people who park their vehicles for the whole day. The remaining 27% of parking spaces benefit 11,400 people who park their vehicles for short durations.
This indicates that the majority of people would like to use the street parking for only short durations of less than 2 hours or so. However, this is not possible because majority of the street parking is already full by then.
The study therefore recommends the provision of multi-storey parking in Central locations like Sunken Carpark on Taifa Road & KICC. This would be aimed at catering for the long duration parking required by city workers.
The street parking policy and charging system should be amended to cater for the majority demand which is for short term street parking of less than 2 hours. This could be done through time controls and enforcing hourly charging systems.
Under such an arrangement and charging 50 shs per hour, this would result in cheaper parking for the majority of commuters who only want to park for 2 hours or less. In addition it would mean that the city council could collect nearly 4 times more revenue on parking for the same number of spaces.
The beauty is that because the demand is so high and the City Council already owns the Land, the building of multi storey parking is self-funding. Indeed if the city council lacks the funds it is possible to lease it to developers under a Private Finance Initiative because of the strong economic viability of the scheme.
David Mutonyi resides in Manchester, UK
