Wrong Approach By Police

The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)

22 June 2011

editorial

The Police Force in Dar es Salaam has launched what is likely to be yet another short-lived campaign to reduce congestion on the city’s roads.The Dar es Salaam Special Police Zone Commander, Mr Suleiman Kova, on Tuesday announced a raft of measures police would take to ensure that motorists adhere to traffic rules, particularly in the city centre.

This latest attempt to solve a problem that has for the past two decades or so been getting worse by the day is bound to fail because it does not address the root cause of congestion and endless jams on the city’s roads.

The number of vehicles in Dar es Salaam has risen exponentially in the last 20 years, but the development of transport infrastructure in the city and its environs has not matched the pace of this increase. The number of vehicles being registered daily is mind-boggling, which means that traffic chaos is likely to worsen in spite of police measures meant to restore a semblance of sanity on the city’s roads.

Any plan to reduce congestion must include a strategy to get as many vehicles off the road as possible, and the most effective way to do this is to improve the efficiency, comfort and convenience of public transport. This is the only way to persuade people owning cars to switch to cheaper public transport and use their own vehicles only sparingly.

As long as people are willing to freely spend their hard-earned money running their private vehicles and be stuck in traffic jams for hours on end almost daily, we should not expect the chaos on our roads to ease any time soon. It is all well and good for police to make sure that motorists and other road users follow traffic rules to the letter, but we doubt if this alone will rid Dar es Salaam roads of congestion and jams that have now become synonymous with the city.

AllAfrica – All the Time