Quickly ease city commuters’ plight

The Ministry of Works and Transport should explore quick options to ease the plight of city commuters. For the second week running since easing restrictions on public transport, city commuters have suffered at jammed-packed stages with no taxis to pick them up, while some have sweated long distances to work and many more endured exorbitant taxi fares. This is because the new system to clear taxis to operate is slow.

Our proposition is not to undercut the well-thought out move to create transport order by the Transport ministry and Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA). But their demands to taxi operators to apply for and secure PSV licence, third party insurance, and advance income payment before being assigned route chart, is draggy.

With only two registration centres for taxis at Kitante Primary School and at Old Kampala Secondary School, there just won’t be any speed in finishing the clearance. Little wonder that of the more than 13,000 taxis that used to serve Kampala City day population of four million people (2014 National Population and Housing Census), only about 4,500 of the taxis have so far been passed and issued to operate in the one week since lifting restrictions on public transport. This sluggish process has seen ‘passengers stranded as public transport reopens (Daily Monitor, June 5), and the city commuters ‘Living the pain of public transport’ (Daily Monitor, June 8).

This tortuous situation demands an urgent need to expedite the clearance to ease the plight of city commuters. This can be quickly done in several ways. One is for the Ministry of Transport and KCCA to extend the grace period for the taxi operators to work before being registered and cleared.

Or set a more flexible and manageable period to undertake the registration. These options should allow more taxi operators, who are only emerging from the lockdown, to run as they finalise with registration and ease movement.
In the short-run, these quick fixes would put more taxis on the road and meet the surging demand as people flock to town to catch up on lost time on their businesses. This tentative plan would also build up competition among taxi operators and work to lower transport fares.

This interim design could run until enough taxis are cleared to ply the city routes. But as things are, most stages on city-bound roads are crowded with passengers, with taxi owners charging more than double the old taxi fares prior to the outbreak Covid-19 pandemic that locked down transport.
In sum, KCCA and the taxi operators can agree to achieve transport order in the city while making travel into and out of the city more bearable for commuters.