Let the roads be roads, and keep them clear

Vehicles scaling Mlima Kiu, a section of Mombasa Road. The entire length of such a prime highway should be a dual carriageway, with three lanes per side, designed and used as an uninterrupted expressway. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • To properly serve the present, and help build the future that the world calls “Africa Rising”, the entire length of such a prime highway should be a dual carriageway, with three lanes per side, designed and used as an uninterrupted expressway.
  • We could start by signposting and marking the road properly;  by building slip roads at all major junctions (and not using them as marketplaces and bus terminals); by bypassing or over-passing bottleneck settlements, and by removing most of the bumps and halving the height and doubling the width of those that are left.

The road from Mombasa to Kisumu is not a village street or a rustic byway.  It is Trans Africa Highway No 8 – Kenya’s busiest and most important road transport corridor, and a vital artery for half a continent!

That is its core purpose. To move people and things – quickly and cost efficiently  – more than any other single road in the whole of middle Africa.  So that must be the absolute priority of its design, management and use.

To properly serve the present, and help build the future that the world calls “Africa Rising”, the entire length of such a prime highway should be a dual carriageway, with three lanes per side, designed and used as an uninterrupted expressway.

If it was that, the whole region would benefit, but most especially it would  do more than any other single infrastructural investment to turbocharge Kenya’s economic decentralisation and development and save Nairbobi from choking  to death on its own fecundity.

While waiting for the penny to drop on that strategic no-brainer, the current scrawny strip of tarmac must still do duty as a high-speed, high-capacity national and  trans-continental mega-highway.  To do that, above all we must make it flow.  If slower is better, then let’s use donkey carts instead; resurrect the Red Flag Act and impose a blanket speed limit of 6kph.  Job done. Economy demolished.  World and regional rivals roaring with laughter.

SLIP ROADS

The world does not invest trillions of dollars a year on tarmac roads and motor vehicles because they are the safest form of land transport, but because they are the quickest. NTSA misses the point and defeats the object by trying to make traffic less dangerous by slowing it down (with bumps and spikes and bizarre limit zones).

It should focus on making roads, vehicles and drivers capable of safely maintaining the national speed limit. That’s what roads and motor vehicles (and hence the NTSA) are for. So away with anything and everything on or near the road that in any way restricts the ambient speed of an arterial expressway.     

We could start by signposting and marking the road properly;  by building slip roads at all major junctions (and not using them as marketplaces and bus terminals); by bypassing or over-passing bottleneck settlements, and by removing most of the bumps and halving the height and doubling the width of those that are left.

If express roads are incompatible with villages and schools, then don’t build them on top of each other – or separate them with a solid barrier and a slip road.  Isn’t that what “planning permission” is for?  Intercontinental highways should not have anything on their hard shoulders. Either the road or the village should move!  

And until they do, police control should keep the road clear of waifs, wastrels, wobbling wanderers and hawkers, not bring it to a halt. Any vehicle/driver that cannot achieve or cope with the ambient flow of a major highway should use another road. Or walk.

If all police resources were devoted solely to catching vehicles that broke the national speed limit on TAH No 8, nothing would change. If instead all personnel and time were devoted to removing vehicles unable to maintain the ambient flow speed, journey times would become shorter…and much, much safer.  The savings would be far greater than the investment.