Traffic in Nairobi costing the country billions

Traffic may seem normal to some city people but there is a lot at stake, traffic congestion challenges are a result of poor planning in the past.

Nairobi loses an estimated $600,000 in lost productivity every day due to traffic jams. Research survey in 2011 showed that the city is the fourth most congested in the world, the number of vehicles on Nairobi roads since 2012 doesn’t match the infrastructure and traffic management, but investing in this is quite expensive.

As the city continues to be hit by rapid urbanization, traffic in Nairobi is expected to worsen if nothing is done about it.

Traffic in Nairobi not only affects the city roads but also major roads that lead to other counties like Mombasa Road, Thika road and even bypasses. Sometimes motorists are affected by their own ignorance to road safety rules like the widely spead overlapping menace which greatly contribute to bad traffic in Nairobi.

There are more factors that lead to traffic jams on major roads like construction inefficiencies or flooding due to poor drainage which has been Nairobi’s recent disaster.

The lack of proper drainage throughout the city contributes to floods that not only damage vehicles but lead to loss of lives. Case in point, there was a bad traffic in Nairobi’s Eastern bypass on Tuesday night where people got stuck for almost 8 hours with some getting home from work as late as 4am. It had rained heavily some hours earlier restricting people to walk home.

Motorists also lose money due to increased fuel consumption and lost opportunities due to the time spent in traffic not to mention increased cases of environmental degradation and air pollution.

This congestion has a negative effect on our health as a US Environmental Protection Agency report explains. Exposure to the fumes exhausted from vehicles for long hours, even at relatively low concentrations, significantly reduces lung function and induces respiratory inflammation in normal, healthy people during periods of moderate exercise.

The government is working on expanding roads to ease traffic in Nairobi through projects such as the Thika super highway where more vehicles use the road every day.  A traffic situation survey showed that 29% of commuters use matatus while 47% walked to work.

Matatus accounted for 27% of the vehicles on the road. The report also noted that 6.8% of commuters use public and private buses (accounting for 3% of vehicles on the road), 0.4% use railway, and 1.2% use bicycles and motorbikes. With the efforts to control traffic congestion in the city by road expansion and more bypasses, can Kenya really win in the fight to ease traffic congestion?