Expressway defies transport economics – Business Daily

After launching the railway to nowhere, government’s games were not over yet. The Kenya National Highway Authority last week announced its intentions to hive off 1.3 acres of Uhuru Park for the construction of the 27km expressway known as Nairobi JKIA to James Gichuru Road Expressway.

This move has angered many, reminding netizens one time when a government blogger advocated for the reclamation of Nairobi National Park to support “economic development” at the time when SGR was being forcefully re-routed into the park by government.

Such ignorant remarks coming out of government operatives are no longer surprising, it has become their cup of tea. The government blogger is oblivious to the fact that most public parks in developed countries were bought from private hands.

For example, land for Central Park in New York City was purchased from private hands in 1851. Three years later, voters in Hartford, Connecticut approved public financing to purchase an industrial area that included a rail road, garbage dump and leather tanneries for a municipal park.

So, where they stand today, can the people of New York City and Hartford, Connecticut say they had to forego economic development?

Back to the expressway for the rich, the project has been sold to the public as one that will ease traffic congestion on Mombasa Road and mobility around the city since its estimated that currently up to 60,000 vehicles ply the JKIA-Westlands route daily and an estimated 25,000 motorists are expected to move to the tolled express highway when completed. That is contrary to the truth.

In the 20th century, William H. Whyte studied failure and successes of the 20th century modern-city planning and architecture through empirical research of human behaviour which utilised photography and documenting cinematography, capturing how qualitative characteristics such as sunlight, places to sit and relationships among architectural features together can shape public spaces.

This study gave much impetus to the urban growth management that to improve accessibility, cities often work not create space for transport but to improve livability and mobility that make cities attractive. The space for transport needs to be reduced more specifically reduced motorised transport in the inner city.

Worldwide, it is estimated that people travel about 60-75 minutes per person per day, so building faster transport systems makes people to travel further, encouraging urban sprawl. This is called the theory of constant travel. Faster roads stimulate people to buy and drive more cars, which results to nuisance driving. There is also the question of land acquisition for road infrastructure which in this case negatively affects the quality of life of the city through the enhanced experience of Uhuru Park.

Therefore, when designing sustainable transport infrastructure such as roads, they are added as you move away from the city centre and not crisscrossing the city as is the case here.

Most commonly used example in explaining this is Tokyo, which is the largest metropolitan area in the world with more than 40 million people covering the size area of 36,000 square kilometres. That is similar to having nearly Kenya’s population occupying the three counties of Machakos, Kitui and Makueni.

Tokyo’s city centre population density drops to about 2,600 people per square kilometres because infrastructure such as roads and open spaces are added as you go away from the city centre.

Urban infrastructure has been designed to stimulate many people to settle in the rural districts far away from the city centre as a sustainable way to decongest the city.

So, to decongest Nairobi, we need road infrastructure that moves masses out of the city centre but government seems to have the understanding that we need to move people out of the country by providing an expressway to the airport.