Joseph ole Tito is a tall, slightly-built man with a calm, unruffled demeanour — until he starts talking about the traffic situation in Kenya, and particularly the mayhem in Nairobi. Then his voice starts rising, almost shrill, until he can’t help thumping the table to emphasise his statements. It becomes clear that in his 32 years in the police force, the past two-and-a-half years he has spent as Traffic Commandant have been among the most challenging.

“When I took over this office, my understanding was that I was handling people who are civilised. But Kenyans have made shortcuts a part of their life, so no one follows the traffic rules anymore,” he says with an air of frustration.

Last year’s Commuter Pain Index by technology firm IBM put Nairobi as the fourth-worst city in the world to be a commuter in: Mexico City was rated the worst, with Shenzhen and Beijing tying in second place. The survey ranked the emotional and economic toll of commuting in 20 cities around the world, and found that nearly two-thirds of respondents in Nairobi report traffic as a key inhibitor to work or school performance.

Authorities in Kenya have been juggling strategies to sort out Nairobi’s unending traffic mess, juggling from tough traffic rules to use of technology to expanding the road network. But still, nothing is working. Recent studies show that despite impressive investments in building road networks, inefficiencies in Nairobi’s  transport system cost the economy an estimated Ksh50 million ($580,000) a day in lost productivity, fuel consumption and pollution, negating the benefits of otherwise significant road infrastructure and limiting economic growth. This translates into Ksh18.2 billion ($220 million) annually.

IBM has now put together a roadmap for the city to harness technology to improve the flow of traffic, increase revenue from the transport sector and enhance collaboration between various transport authorities.

The blueprint presented by the IBM team includes the use of mobile phones, sensors and closed-circuit television networks to better pinpoint traffic issues. The team says that mobile signals could track and identify hotspots, alerting mobile users on routes to avoid; traffic police could also use mobile solutions to communicate traffic updates as well as enforce traffic rules.

But for this to happen, the police’s Traffic Department would have to digitise its records and develop a database that captures traffic incidents around the country. At present, most traffic records are filed manually at individual police stations — holding back the adoption of integrated, mobile-based solutions.

According to Vincent Njoroge, IBM global business services leader for East Africa, the creation of a central command centre could be implemented in just 90 days using existing technologies.

“Right now, traffic police have no way of telling whether the owner of the car they have stopped on the side of the road has been involved in other accidents or if they have outstanding traffic violations,” he says. 

“One element of this intelligent centre that we propose is to build a system that can be accessed via mobile phones. Through this system, traffic police could enter the number plate of a vehicle and find out its history on the spot through their phone. This would provide more traffic awareness, allow for intelligent enforcement and also allow tracking of vehicles through a central intelligent operations and command centre.” 

Dar, Kampala case

But the congestion nightmare isn’t limited to Nairobi alone — Dar es Salaam and Kampala, too, are choking under dilapidated roads and punishing long commutes. Traffic jams in Dar es Salaam are reportedly costing the Tanzanian economy Tsh 4 billion ($2.5 million) every day.

According to recent studies by the Confederation of Tanzania Industries, traffic jams are eating into more than 20 per cent of annual profits of most businesses. To ease the congestion, the Dar es Salaam Bus Rapid Transit is now underway with the construction of stations and the first dedicated lanes to accommodate specialised buses with a capacity to carry not less than 100 passengers.

“This project will greatly reduce traffic jams in Dar es Salaam. The Surface and Marine Transport Authority-Sumatra] is working closely with Tanroads (Tanzania Roads Agency) on whose board we sit, to come up with solutions to deal with the traffic mess, especially in Dar es Salaam, which contributes not less than 75 per cent of the country’s revenues,” said Sumatra’s public affairs manager, Franklyn Mziray.

In Kampala, a decision to substitute 14-seater taxis with a new fleet of buses to ease the gridlock seems not to have solved the problem because the city’s roads remain narrow. Pioneer Easy Buses reportedly invested Ush23 billion ($9.2 million) to import buses from China. Of the total 522 buses bought under the agreement with Kampala, Capital City Authority, 100 are already operating in Kampala competing with smaller cars and trucks for the same roads.

“If special lanes were made for these buses, then the traffic jam would reduce, but this is not being done,” said a Kampala city trader, Godfrey Bulega, adding that the number of small cars are also on the increase.

Rwanda, too, is set to overhaul the public transport system in Kigali to reduce traffic congestion and pollution. Kigali city authorities are in the process of placing restrictions on street parking around the city centre and introducing standard large bus services and an integrated public transport ticketing system, a five-year progressive plan that is expected to cost $368 million.

The team of IBM consultants in Nairobi proposed the use of existing and new CCTV cameras to show vehicle and traffic conditions in real time, as well as crowd-sourcing information from the public on traffic snarl-ups. Already, a number of traffic cameras have been set up in Nairobi, and mobile apps such as VIPI can be used give traffic updates to commuters.

“The intelligent operations centre would support existing initiatives like VIPI or #OverLapKe on Twitter by integrating the data from them into a single source,” says Njoroge.

Sharing information

He adds: “There are also other simple methods that already exist which could get a more accessible system up and running without requiring much investment. For instance, if mobile service providers shared information from their networks on where they see increased density in mobile signals— as commuters sit in their cars in jams — and we overlaid this data on a map, the information could be fed into an analytics solution which would then predict and inform commuters and the police on traffic flows using a simple platform like SMS.”

One of the major issues in Nairobi’s central business district is finding parking. IBM’s Parking Survey 2011 found that the city has one of the world’s longest parking wait times, taking between 30 and 45 minutes to identify a spot.

According to ole Tito, there is also another sinister effect.

“If vehicles are moving slowly in town, it encourages muggings and drivers having their side mirrors torn off,” he says. “So lack of parking is not just a city council issue, it’s a security and police issue as well.”

Njoroge says that the proposed parking system would tie into a database housed at the City Council of Nairobi, which would enable commuters to access instant updates on free parking spaces in the CBD, and allocate them to specific users.

“Drivers could then pay for the space using a mobile payments system, which would ensure a more efficient process and increase revenue collection by the City Council,” adds Njoroge.

Additional reporting by Joseph Mwamunyange, Isaac Khisa and Berna Namata