The vehicular traffic congestion problem that plagues the road network in Accra and many other major cities will only be alleviated when the number of people using private cars are reduced.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, a transport consultant, Kojo Antwi, explained that all though a small percentage of people using private vehicles occupy a large section of the road space.
Thus any programme that does not target the people in private cars cannot adequately address the problem of road congestion, Mr. Antwi said.
“The 15 percent of the people who are driving the cars are those who are occupying 85 percent of your road space. So any programme that does not target this 15 percent of the people in private cars to get them out of their cars into one form of public mass transport system or the other is failing.”
Mr. Antwi suggested that the metropolis must start gravitating towards a system “that will force people to move out of their cars and that is what has been done everywhere.”
He cited other third world cities like Bogota in Colombia and Curitiba in Brasil that had effectively tackled their congestion problems with policy.
“They put the infrastructure in place, put the system in place and then put in place punitive systems for you to drive your car. It becomes expensive to drive your car into the city centre because of congestion charges,” Mr. Anti stated.
Mr. Antwi also said the recently implemented Bus Rapid Transport system essentially mirrored the Metro Mass Transport system because it was not “rapid” in the sense of the word and had so far failed to ease congestion in the capital.
He stressed that the BRT system, which was rolled out in October 2016, must give people in private cars a reason to choose the buses over their own vehicles, but has yet been able to do so because it does not have the dedicated facilities to be considered rapid.
“An effective bus rapid system must be bus-based but it must rapid. It means that you need to have dedicated facilities; bus stops, scheduled services, ITS systems, all of that.”
“So if you have a bus system that would not be rapid and goes to sit in the same congestion as any other vehicle, then all you have done just increased the capacity of the vehicle moving people but you have not solved congestion,” Mr. Antwi explained.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
