Inside Nairobi's 1948 plan to tame traffic nightmare

Koinange Street, March 1960. [File, Standard]

The battle for life and sanity in Nairobi did not start yesterday. The carnage which has recently transformed parts of the smoothest roads in the city into death traps too has been going on for ages.

Even long before the matatu and all its attendant madness had been invented and Nairobi was not even a city, the nightmare of road carnage was real and town planners, appalled by loss of over 100 people annually, in 1944 started looking for answers.

Interestingly, although, this was a time Africans were barred from walking on sections of the streets, horses had right of way in some sections which also boasted an estimated 11,000 cyclists who were facing unique problems.

At the time city workers residing in official housing zones and working in the industrial or commercial centre, opted to cycle to work as there were scheduled buses. Unlike their counterparts in other parts of the world, the Kenyan cyclists who were mostly whites were still fearful of being crashed to death by careless drivers. They lobbied the government to construct planned subways under each junction so that they could cross safely.

Horse riders too dreamed of establishment of green strips around the city where they would have the right of way to enjoy their morning or evening ride without distraction or noise from vehicular traffic.

But apparently, they were just like beggars because the government pleaded poverty while explaining why it could not meet the demands. These teething problems prompted the government to develop a master plan in 1948 which among other things proposed construction of bypasses ringing the city so as to decongest Nairobi.

The master plan recommended an immediate decision be made in the sitting of the East Africa trunk roads - a decision whether they should coincide with some of Nairobi's parkway roads or bypass the city altogether. According to the planners the most important road at the time was passing through Nairobi from southeast to northwest, branching outside the city to southeast to the coast and further onto Tanzania, Uganda and Congo.

For this reason, the master plan recommended that a bypass be constructed so that motorists who had no business in the CBD needed not venture there.

To avoid anarchy, the planners concluded that "it is within the power of Nairobi to plan to avoid a complete traffic breakdown and increasing slaughter on the road. It is not of course necessary that the solutions planned now should all be carried out immediately but carried out on properly worked out programme of development."

The colonial government opted to wait. Eighty years later, Nairobi remains every motorist's worst nightmare.