In Kenya’s capital, people spend hours in traffic jams. An expensive approach leads to criticism
When people talk about Africa in connection with road traffic, many think of hardly used slopes that run through endless landscapes and of rattling boxes that made German TÜV employees drop their pens. Or to sleepy villages where children form creaking hordes at the sound of a car engine. On the other hand, hardly anyone thinks of kilometers of vehicle jams on four-lane highways. And yet, to the chagrin of African city dwellers, they are much more common than sweating TÜV employees.
The metropolises of the continent suffer from chronic congestion: In Kenya’s capital Nairobi, commuters can even have to spend a whole night in a traffic jam in their vehicles. Like recently, when Nairobi’s motorists were once again stuck for hours in their 4.5 million inhabitants: inside metropolis. “Insane! After eleven hours in the car, I finally got home at four in the morning ”, lawyer Pauline Otsyula grumbled on Twitter. When he finally got to his house early in the morning, he should have made the return trip to work, added a fellow sufferer. Others preferred to spend the night in the car by the side of the road. That was good for their nerves, but not for the flow of traffic.
Fear of a two-tier solution
Nairobi is known by experts as the second worst congested metropolis in the world. On average, your citizens spend more than an hour in traffic every day. This can also be seen as progress: It makes it clear that an increasing number of Kenyans can now afford cars. However, the city fathers seem to have slept through the trend for decades. Only recently they gave the green light to a Chinese company to build a ten-lane bypass, some of which is raised on stilts. And ironically, their construction is currently causing traffic to collapse more thoroughly than ever before. The most recent road closure was also due to a route construction site, which also resulted in an accident. Those involved would not have wanted to agree on a different and peaceful solution to their conflict, complained the traffic office: they had rather waited for hours for the police, who were also stuck in a traffic jam. For the authority, the answer to the question of who was responsible for the traffic collapse is therefore clear.
In order to be able to finance the billion-dollar route, Nairobi’s city fathers will later charge a toll for its use. This will also lead to a two-class system in road traffic, so the criticism. Above the richer motorists: inside with free travel – below above all the minibuses called “Matatu”, on which a large part of the population depends as a means of transport.
Other African metropolises such as the Nigerian port city of Lagos, Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa or the Tanzanian Dar-es-Salam have learned different lessons from their traffic collapse. Lines for S-Bahn are now being built there. Why Kenya’s government opted for a different path will remain a mystery for the time being. The wrong way promises the majority of the population many more nights to be spent in traffic jams.
