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.