Nairobi’s transport problems are old. They seem intractable; if anything, they seem to worsen by the day. The temptation is to shrug and walk away. We can’t.
Many of us saw Monday night’s interviews with the victims of Sunday’s horrific accident on Lang’ata Road. They expressed themselves with a quiet dignity, in the face of terrible sadness. We owe it to them, and to the loved ones they lost, to make absolutely certain that no one else suffers as they have.
How? It’s time for a radical plan.
Nairobi’s traffic problem must be tackled by addressing both the infrastructural inadequacies as well as the behavioural tendencies of road users. With a good plan (many great plans already exist), political goodwill and a well structured financing model, the infrastructural aspect will be much easier to deal with. This will include the setting up of a modern mass transit system with a mix of both light rail terminated at nodes around the central business district and integrating this with the current public transport system (the only thing public about our public transport system today is the passengers).
It will also include dedicated public transport and utility lanes on the major arteries into the city. It is clear, at least to me, that, in due course, we will need to reduce the numbers of private vehicles on Nairobi’s roads.
This will only be done by establishing a reliable, efficient and decent mass transit system. It is the way all major cities in the world have gone. Addis Ababa has beaten us to it. The Dubai Metro took only three years to set up. In many of the cities of the world it is not even fashionable to own a car; you take the train or the bus. These plans will be discussed in detail as we get into the manifesto and debate phase of the 2017 elections.
However today, the greater challenge is in dealing with the behavioural issues. Manners. We have simply thrown courtesy and manners out of the window (together with a lot of trash).
A traffic snarl up is easily caused by only four drivers not wanting to give each other way. Many of us cringe at overlapping drivers, whether it is a private vehicle or matatu but only when we are not in the offending vehicle. We cheer on the drivers when in the said vehicle. It has become an ugly side of our culture. A sense of self importance and exaggerated urgency without regard to other road users.
However, whether we agree to behave or not to behave, we should not be allowed to do just what we please on the road.
The problem is not an absence of rules governing behaviour on our roads. The problem is that those rules either go unenforced, or are enforced unevenly and at the heart of this problem of enforcement is corruption: Nairobi’s transport problem is, in large part, a corruption problem.
The essential thing is to attack the corruption which makes accidents like Sunday’s possible. Once we see that the problem is corruption, we can use what works against corruption to keep Nairobi’s roads safe. And we do know a number of things that work against corruption. One is automation: reducing the number of people who have to take decisions about rules makes it harder for any of them to hide, or extort money using their positions.
Reducing the human interaction with cash in the name of fines. In many countries where people have exhibited good manners and courtesy on their roads, stopping at the lights even at midnight, crossing roads at the right place etc every road user is very aware that any infringement of the law captured on camera will attract a mandatory fine and will end up on the record of the driver.
For Nairobi traffic, that means we ought to use the cameras we have to monitor traffic and enforce the rules. Since we cannot cover all of Nairobi, we will have to cover accident blackspots, and the main routes in and out of the city. Nairobi already has a control room, to which security images are continually transmitted.
It is time to add traffic capacity to that control room. Once we have the images, we can then use them to punish traffic offenders. The difference, on this model, is that instead of police casting a net for offenders, the bulk of manpower will be devoted to reacting to proven offenders. Fewer officers will be required to actually enforce the laws, and indeed none at all to detect the actual offence.
A weapon that has worked against corruption — automation — ought now to be turned against traffic offenders. Nairobi cannot afford to lose any more lives to carelessness, corruption and impunity.
