Last Friday Accra was a motorist's hell. It was as if the whole city had been given to Taysec to take their usual time in constructing all the city's main roads, with its attendant traffic jam. A typical drive from 37 Military Hospital to Peace FM, Achimota, which would have taken one and a half hours peak time, took four hours Friday. What makes traffic jams problematic in our urban areas is that they are worsened by roads that are built so haphazardly that they allow indiscipline to add more jam to the traffic. The tro-tro (mini-bus) drivers who believe they have that privileged job because of their superior wisdom are quick to create extra lanes from non-existing roads, which only end up choking the flow.

What returned to Qanawu’s mind was this lingering question: has Government really got a notional clue about how to tackle the road traffic situation in our urban areas? The ready-made retort is NO! Well, the Deputy Road Transport Minister recently announced that a comprehensive, integrated transport policy should be expected in 2007. So, until then it is safe to say that Government so far is only doing what others before it did: expand a few roads; tar some; grade others; lump a few sleeping police on some and voila, pray it all translates into votes.

You don’t need to be connected to the Building and Road Research Institute (one of the 13 research Institutes of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) to know that the rate of increase in car usage is not sustainable. The growing road traffic in Ghana cannot be explained away as just a natural cause of more vehicles being acquired. It is more than that. It is the consequence of a country that has been sleep-developing for decades. Given the strategic importance of transport to the economy, you may wonder how come the country has had no overall transport strategy to work with. That’s just how sad we are. Even when we decide to ease traffic on a major commercial road like the Teshie-Nungua link for Tema and Accra, we lack the courage to bulldoze some of the shacks of property by the road side to dualise the route. Another typical example is the area earmarked some time back to be the main artery, linking Accra (at the Airport end) to the fast-developing residential areas off the Spintex Road. That intended road has now been sold off to private developers for housing. Accra has very few access roads and plenty of leaders wearing spectacles of myopia.

The analysis of the traffic on a transport link appears never to have been a fundamental concern of our transportation engineers. According to two experts, D Innes, and AM Stevens, two essential components of traffic analysis are: the traffic load that will use the facility (demand, need, market); and the ability of the system to handle the traffic load (supply service, capacity). If we had stayed guided by these essentials over the years, we probably would have had a more integrated transport system and better urban planning than the slapdash, arbitrary state of affairs that gets more and more difficult to roll back as the sprawling continues unabatedly.

Have the authorities any data on the average annual daily traffic on any street or roadway in Ghana? Some commonly used units of measurement for traffic flow are vehicles per day, vehicles per hour, passengers per day, tonne-kilometres, tonnes, cubic metres, and so on. In conventional highway terminology, the common measurements of traffic flow are vehicles per day or vehicles per hour.

Try getting out of Accra to, say, Kumasi, and see how many options you have apart from Achimota. Yet, there is nothing structurally stopping us from building a kind of Accra orbital, a dual carriageway that will go round the city, which you can go on to get from east to west, south to north, etc. We are just too lazy. Do we even know the economic cost of traffic, vis-à-vis the cost of building good, wide roads - and, completing them on time or be caught by contractual penalty clauses? Of course, a company like Taysec would have gone bankrupt by now if penalty clauses were strictly enforced in their contracts. We are just too bloody lazy to think far and deep. We are too happy with little silly showy stuff. Just look at that useless monstrosity that came out of the much-awaited Tetteh-Quarshie interchange. Richard Anane probably hailed it as one of his greatest achievements. (He would, wouldn’t he! So brilliant was he that the President can’t even find a replacement.) But, that Tetteh-Quarshie job is simply a very unimaginative waste of space and money. The design did not even factor in how pedestrians could cross from one end to the other. That big space could have even catered for a major public transport station, catering for that part of town, and still have an interchange that kept the traffic flowing, rather than motorists now having to burn extra fuel going in circles.

Government needs to maintain an open mind on privatisation of road ownership. In America, in spite of their nigh-excellent road networks, you can still pay a little extra for a guaranteed open road. The cost of the Tema Motorway is even a bad advertisement for built-operate-and-transfer by the private sector. We have been paying ¢500 (about half a cent) for the whole of the Kufuor administration, if Qanawu recalls rightly. There’s not even provisions for regular users to make multiple pre-payments, like one month or six month pass. Travel from Johannesburg to Durban in South Africa, you will come across an equal number of tolls like you’ll meet from Paris to Calais – about six or so. And, they all cost money. There, you’re paying for good, wide roads. Here you pay more for bad roads with regular tyre and suspension change. And, of course, road fatalities, too.

Some bold decisions have to be taken if we are to tackle the worsening case of traffic in our urban areas. First among these is, in Qanawu’s view, the profusion of jitneys – or trotros – ought to be dealt with and drastically. Since the omnibus made its maiden appearance in Nantes, France, in 1826, there has probably never been a more disorganised public transport system like we have here in Ghana and Nigeria. We must gather the courage to get rid of the tro-tros. Tro-tros, at least as currently operated, are becoming more of a menace and a traffic jam on our development than a vehicle of social and economic mobility. We need to regulate access to routes by commercial vehicles (or public transport providers). The system has been too laissez faire and too cheap for our own good. As it is, all one needs to do now is to find some money to buy a used mini-van from Holland, cut in some windows, weld in some seats, pick up a no-questions-asked licence and off you choose a route to ply. Even the nation champions of liberal economy regulate mass transit ownership to a fault. It is estimated that over 60 percent of traffic jams in the capital, Accra, is caused by these unregulated road hooligans - mini-buses. There are so many of them that rather than making transport access easier, they end up choking our roads instead. It is not beyond our Road Transport Ministry to come up with a policy of zoning and awarding the routes to private but regulated transport companies to run. That should not stop individual transport owners coming together to buy route operating licences, if they want. The current system is simply unsustainable.

We need a transport policy that is sustainable and as environmentally friendly as possible. The whole economy and society depends heavily on efficient road transport; this is a country where 99 percent of the goods are moved by road and 99.9 percent of the persons by cars, buses or coaches. Indeed, Qanawu is yet to come across any country taking a good shot at its development targets that has no railway network of note. We need to develop rail transport to, among others, ease the haulage on our roads, which ends up destroying the road quicker. There has to be a serious go at switching freight from road to rail. An efficient, fast, reliable train service will do miracles in stemming rural-urban migration. The law firm Qanawu worked with before returning to Ghana, had an accountant who since the 1960s, traveled everyday from Yorkshire, Northern England, to London, in the south, until she retired in 2002. And, she did this by train. Ask yourself, how many white collar workers commute to work by public transport? But, we cannot continue with the each-driving-her-car-to-work kind of transport culture.

The five Government objectives for transport concern should be, as operating elsewhere, basically about environment, safety, economy, accessibility, and integration. Every transport project must be evaluated by these criteria.

We may blame past under investment for making the public transport network badly maintained, under-capacity, and characterised by poor quality and lack of choice. Currently, transport means road, and the transport networks are woefully unable to meet current demand. But, the way forward is certainly not only in building roads at random. We need to encourage sustainable modes of transport, such as motorcycling, cycling, walking and public mass transit.

The south can learn a lot from the north.Tamale has the largest concentration of bicycles and bicycle usage in Ghana. According to the BRRI, bicycles constitute some 60 percent of all vehicle trips in the municipality. Unfortunately, the study also revealed that cyclists are more than six times as likely to die in accidents than motorists. This is because we afford cyclists no respect or safety on the roads. In places like Oxford and Amsterdam, there are even traffic lights for cyclists, and roads mapped out for cyclists only, with them having right of way sometimes. We need to make cycling attractive and safe in our cities.

The experts agree that increasing the supply of transport infrastructure may reduce congestion in the short run but simply generate additional traffic leaving no net gain in long term traffic flows. Moreover, the environmental impact and further negative externalities are unsustainable. The advantage we have here is that our current infrastructure is far too low to give us that comfort. By all means, let us build more, but in an integrated manner for sustainability.