Public service vehicles will soon be using dedicated lanes on the Thika Superhighway and Mombasa Road in changes geared at easing traffic in Nairobi.
Personal and small-capacity vehicles will be banned from the special lanes, according to Transport Cabinet Secretary James Macharia, who said he will gazette the changes.
“I’m going to gazette the rules. If you drive your car on the PSV lanes you will face penalties. You will be fined,” he said after a meeting with the Senate’s Roads Committee in Nairobi.
He said some lanes will be dedicated to emergency vehicles such as ambulances and police cars and those carrying the sort of Very Very Important Persons that sometimes necessitate the closure of roads.
“The innermost lanes on Thika Road and Mombasa Road, marked in red, will be dedicated to the Bus Rapid Transport to facilitate easy movement of high capacity buses carrying over 80 passengers,” the Kenya National Highways Authority (Kenha), which mapped out the city roads, said on Twitter.
ROAD REFORMS
The other targeted roads are Lang'ata, Juja, Jogoo and Waiyaki Way, according to Urban Planning Principal Secretary Charles Mwaura.
CS Macharia said the plan will also involve the acquisition of public service vehicles that can transport up to 100 passengers at once.
“More than 900 buses are required in the six corridors and because we don’t have them, we have opened one corridor, the Thika Superhighway.
"From Thursday, we are starting the demarcation and dedication of that lane,” Mr Macharia told the committee.
The aim is to encourage more people to use matatus into the city rather than cars that end up congesting the city.
“That is what we want to see. If they succeed, then we can all leave our cars at home and use buses into town,” he said.
SPECIAL LANES
The highway’s main bottlenecks, however, are at Pangani, where the four lanes on the main highway and the two from Kiambu and Muthaiga roads merge into three before opening up into two lanes each on Prof Wangari Maathai Road.
The plans for the special lanes have been on the cards since Mutula Kilonzo was Minister for Nairobi Metropolitan Development in 2008.
NYS BUSES
The Matatu Owners Association, chaired by Simon Kimutai, is the author of a petition under consideration by the Roads Committee to stop the deployment of 24 buses on nine city routes by the National Youth Service.
