Archive for September 24th, 2007
Kenya’s ‘City in the Sun’ chokes with traffic
Once known as East Africa’s green “City in the Sun”, Nairobi is so choked with traffic that Kenya’s architects suggest moving to a new capital and angry business leaders say the booming economy is under threat.
A combination of bad drivers, ramshackle vehicles, overloaded trucks, potholed roads and corrupt traffic police make one of Africa’s biggest cities resemble the dodgems on a good day and, when things get really bad, reduce it to gridlock.
Swarming minibuses, known as matatus, are the only option for most Nairobi commuters, but they are notorious for their drivers’ kamikaze tactics and their crumbling mechanical condition — which often means no lights at night.
Matatus, weaving wildly from lane to lane, account for 80% of public transport and are a major cause of congestion.
Fatal crashes are common. The Sunday Nation newspaper called a recent spate of matatu accidents a “national slaughter”.
Kenya’s crumbling roads and the chaotic traffic have become a political issue ahead of elections in December, denting the popularity of President Mwai Kibaki.
A recent survey said traffic jams were costing Nairobi drivers up to 50-million shillings (R5,2-million, $746 000) a day through increased fuel consumption, mechanical damage and pollution.
“The amount of fuel used is astronomical, just sitting in traffic idling away, ” said Betty Maina, head of the Kenya Association of Manufacturers.
“Things are delayed, you don’t accomplish as much, it takes longer getting to meetings and events. You get up earlier trying to beat the traffic but sometimes you just cannot beat it.”
She said the turnaround time for trucks and vans had doubled and some companies were increasing the sizes of their delivery vehicles because of the delays, compounding the problem.
Shift capital?
The Architectural Association of Kenya (AAK) last month asked the government to move the capital elsewhere.
“Nairobi was designed half a century ago for a population of half a million people while the population today is three million. This has overstretched entirely all the services of the whole city,” AAK chairperson Gideon Mulyungi said in a speech.
City traffic is worst on Friday evenings, especially near pay day. When rain turns the potholes into ponds, there is chaos.
The jams are regularly compounded by a string of accidents and breakdowns, many involving ancient trucks which have a tendency to roll backwards down Nairobi’s many hills.
Nairobi’s traffic lights are largely ignored.
The police, known for being more interested in bribes from harassed motorists than untangling the jams, often overrule the lights anyway and their efforts can make the hold-ups worse.
Yet experts, including Japanese road engineers who did a two-year study, say Nairobi’s problems are not insurmountable and nothing like as complex as some cities.
While traffic has expanded — some estimates say by 300% in a decade — the roads have not.
“The problem is the growth of vehicles compared to the rate of developing the road network. For some time this has not been developing while traffic expanded,” city engineer Charles Chiruri said.
There is only one road, the Uhuru Highway, running right through the city and it is punctuated by a string of roundabouts acting as anarchic traffic traps.
The highway is used not only by most commuters but also by heavy trucks transiting to all parts of the country, including from the port of Mombasa to Uganda and Central Africa.
‘Missing links’
Plans to overcome Nairobi’s congestion — bypasses, overpasses and 14 “missing links” to avoid long detours — began 30 years ago. Nothing was done.
The reason, say experts, was systematic corruption during the 24-year rule of former President Daniel arap Moi, who was replaced in 2002 by Kibaki.
For the decade after 1994, foreign donor funding, essential for building new roads, dried up because of the huge graft.
“By 2002, things were so bad that what was happening was there was no competitive tendering at all. Just a cartel of five cowboy contractors,” said a former government engineer who asked not to be named.
“They quoted whatever they liked and then doubled or tripled it. They got paid and did not do the job and then claimed more because of bad weather.”
By the end of the Moi era only 20% of the country’s roads were in adequate condition.
It is taking years to overcome the backlog. Even now, five years later, about 57% of the network is in poor shape, while the booming economy puts even more cars on the road.
Big donor countries privately express frustration that the comprehensive 2006 Japanese plan for solving Nairobi’s road and traffic problems has still not been implemented.
Roads Ministry spokesperson Richard Abura said it had taken time to find donors to fund the work. “Early this year we started implementing the report. We are going to concession the bypasses as soon as we get some funding.”
In April, President Kibaki announced plans for a two billion Kenyan shilling (R209-million, $30-million) Chinese project to widen the Uhuru Highway and link it to the west of the city.
But some Western donors complain this is not coordinated with the Japanese plan and many people remain sceptical at the pace of change.
“I don’t think this is going to improve in the short term. The issue with Nairobi is that there just isn’t a comprehensive plan in place yet,” said Maina of the manufacturers’ association. – Reuters
Barry Mood (Mail & Guardian)
Related Stories on this web log:
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )City Growth Can Be ‘A Force for Good’
As more and more people move to cities, leaders must prepare to deal with the negative, and positive, new urban environment.
 |
| Urbanization is inevitable, but it can also be positive. Photo Credit: Shirine Bakhat/Mercy Corps |
The growth of cities will be the single largest influence on human society in the 21st century, according to a new United Nations report, which argues that urbanization can be a much more powerful force for positive change than many currently believe. Around the world, urban areas are growing at more than 1.2 million people a week, says “State of the World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.”The report notes that 2030’s expected urban population will be nearly 5 billion. By contrast, the total human population this year — both urban and rural — is around 6 billion.
The future of cities in developing countries — and the future of humanity itself — “depend very much on the decisions made now in preparation for this growth,” George Martine, the principle author of the report, said at its release last week. Urbanization is inevitable but it can also be positive, he added.
Up to now, policy makers and civil society organizations have merely reacted to the challenges of urbanization as they arise. Instead, “a pre-emptive approach is needed,” argues Martine’s report, adding that policy makers and advocates must better understand the way cities are growing if they are to effectively solve the related social and environmental problems.
A key misconception to be dispelled, according to the report, is that urbanization is inherently bad for people and the planet. Images of city slums, poverty, and environmental degradation can easily lead people to judge city growth negatively, but according to Martine, “urbanization can and should be a force for good.”
There are many economic, social, and environmental advantages to concentrating people and the services and jobs they need in close proximity to one another. The higher intensity of economic activity in cities favors jobs and income. In addition to this, proximity and concentration allow for governments to more effectively and inexpensively provide social services, infrastructure, and amenities to their citizens, the report explains.
And from an environmental standpoint, concentrating the world’s population minimizes human encroachment on natural habitats.
The Worldwatch Institute’s Christopher Flavin sees cities as powerful drivers behind efforts to combat climate change. As national governments and the international community have lagged on many environmental initiatives, he said recently, cities are stepping in to put in place “concrete policies and plans that address climate issues.”
Cities like Rizhao, China; Bogotá, Colombia; Chicago; and New York are among the many implementing environmentally friendly building, car, and energy strategies, according to Flavin’s group. And this, he said, is becoming an important national and international political force placing pressure on governments worldwide to step up.
Flavin spoke at the Washington, DC release of the 108-page report, which is the annual flagship analysis produced by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
Another common misconception the report debunks is that the majority of urban growth is occurring in mega-cities (those with 10 million or more people). The truth is that smaller cities — those with less than 500,000 inhabitants — contain more than half the world’s urban population and will continue to absorb the majority of urban growth in the future.
This is good news, says UNFPA, because smaller cities usually have greater flexibility to expand, ability to attract investments, and decision-making autonomy.
The bad news, however, is that smaller cities generally have more unaddressed issues and may have problems with housing, drinking water, sanitation, waste disposal, and other public services.
UNFPA’s report is hopeful that, once political leaders better understand these characteristics of urbanization, its benefits can be maximized and negative consequences reduced.
U.S. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is also optimistic. “The world’s cities are places of hope,” she said last week. “The possibilities are there, and that is what we should focus on for the future.”
In cities, vast inequalities remain, Maloney said, citing particularly the area of reproductive health. “There are huge gaps in access between the wealthy and the poor, and we must reverse this trend.”
Improving access to reproductive health would help slow the growth of cities, the UN report says, adding that “natural increase” — the difference between births and deaths — is the main cause of urban growth.
Facilitating urbanization and increasing interactions between rural and urban areas, rather than trying to prevent or ignore it, can stimulate rural and urban development.
Worldwide, many lawmakers mistakenly focus on preventing rural-urban migration, believing this to be the main cause of city growth, according to the report. A better approach to slow urban growth — and buy time to prepare for the expansion of urban populations — would be to focus on lowering unwanted fertility, says UNFPA.
Empowering women and ensuring better access to health services could help achieve this goal, the UN agency says.
Additionally, it warns against measures that try to curb urbanization, as these can make both urban and rural poverty worse because they attempt to contravene economic realities.
“Workers need the opportunities cities offer, and cities need workers,” the UNFPA report states, adding that millions of migrants move to cities each year because they intuitively perceive the advantages of urban life.
“Facilitating urbanization and increasing interactions between rural and urban areas, rather than trying to prevent or ignore it, can stimulate rural and urban development,” UNFPA says.
Overall, urbanization has the potential to be a positive force economically, socially, and environmentally, the report’s lead author Martine said last week.
“The vast urban expansion in developing countries has global implications and requires a global response,” he explained. “The train is in motion and together we have to make sure we are on the right track.”
Global Envision
Related Stories on this web log:
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
Kenya Environmental & Political News Weblog 