Moja Expressway, the company tasked with running the Nairobi Expressway, on Wednesday, July 20, revealed that the inflow of vehicles on the elevated road leading into the Central Business District (CBD) had caused massive traffic over the recent past.
Media reports indicated that the operator is working alongside the Kenya National Highway Authority (KeNHA) and the Ministry of Transport to fix the traffic situation along the road.
Moja Expressway Head of Public Relations, Jeanne May Ong'iyo, however, termed the trial phase of the expressway as a success. She highlighted that over 30,000 vehicles use the 27-kilometre road on a daily basis.
The trial phase enabled the operator to address teething problems such as regulating traffic flows on the road and removing vehicles' logbooks as a requirement to register for the On-Board Unit (OBU) to make it more convenient for users to access the road.
"We expect the number (30,000 vehicles) to rise higher in the coming days. We expected it to pick up but this has not been the case. Hence, we have gone a step further to do door-to-door ETC services so that more people use the road and don't have to be stuck in traffic.
"The government, in constructing the expressway, tasked us with picking up 30 percent of traffic from Mombasa road and Waiyaki way," she told Citizen TV.
According to the operator, the Ksh88 billion elevated road experiences peak usage on Wednesdays and Fridays.
President Uhuru Kenyatta is expected to commission the road by end of July before he retires, when his tenure ends after the August 9 polls.
Recently, the expressway introduced safety measures to contain the rising number of accidents witnessed on the highway in the recent past.
These include reinforced steel barriers installed at all toll stations, placement of rumble strips a few metres to the station, and deployment of more security detail at the entries and exits of the stations. According to the operator, the officers will be armed with speed guns.
"Once you're caught speeding, it's up to the traffic police to decide on what's best. We are not tasked with law enforcement hence we will hand you over to the traffic police who take up the matter," Ong'iyo noted.
