Oh, the loss Dar's traffic jams cause!

BY EDITOR

5th November 2013

Editorial cartoon

Modern life involves, of necessity, people acquiring gadgets that help them lead lives worlds different from those of their ancestors.

For instance, while in those ages gone by people used to walk miles and miles from village to village, now it takes a matter of hours or minutes to do so by bus or car for individuals who can afford the comfort.

This is necessary, particularly in urban areas where time is especially decisive important in getting things done. And whereas people in villages may have all the time to move place to place on foot for some business, it is quite different in urban areas.
Most urbanites have a lot more to do, be it office work or personal business, and are therefore forced to use public transport in the form of commuter buses commonly known as daladala, or personal cars.

Cities like Dar es Salaam boast hundreds and hundreds of daladala and private cars. Added to this fleet of motor vehicles are motorcycles, popularly referred to as bodaboda, lorries and bicycles, not to mention the huge armies of people who walk on the same roads.

In a situation like this, particularly considering the state of our roads and the vehicles plying them, there are bound to be huge traffic jams in our cities.

Road traffic congestion has increasingly growth into a real nuisance, and is costing the economy a fortune. A just-completed survey by this paper between September and October puts the figure at a whopping 411 billion/- per year.

This is an immense lot of money, with which at least 24,000 classrooms and 19,000 teachers’ houses would have been built, substantially easing the endemic shortage of classrooms and teachers’ houses facing schools in the country.

The problem of road traffic jams is very much with us, the all-important question relating to what we ought to do to solve it. There is no scarcity of workable options. First, satellite towns could be started close to major cities, all with the items and services that would go into supporting a decent life.

This would reduce the influx to our cities’ central business district (CBD) of people seeking things like passports, justice and specialised healthcare.

Secondly, city authorities and the Tanzania Railways Ltd (TRL) ought to intensify city commuter train services by taking over the responsibility from the shoulders of Transport minister Dr Harrison Mwakyembe.

We believe that well-run commuter train services can “poach” massive numbers of people who would ordinary flocked to bus stops to board daladala and other public service vehicles, thus decongesting our roads appreciably.

There is also the fact that it would no longer be necessary for car owners to drive all the way to CBDs to access basic needs. Rather, they could elect to drive to points somewhere outside CBDs and conveniently hop on to a commuter train and on to their destinations.

This is common in developed countries. All said, something needs to be done, and urgently at that, to make our choked roads breathe with ease once more. It can be done. It ought to be done. 

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN