For Greater Kampala, rapid bus system is a dream come true

Gridlock: Taxis stuck in traffic jam in downtown Kampala. The congestion is worsened by boda bodas. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

  • The Promise Tracker is Daily Monitor’s weekly special feature that tracks the promises made by leaders of all categories as well as public agencies to the people. The aim is to cause accountability, show status and analyse whether it was a realistic, unrealistic or empty promise.

The promise:
On February 17, 2009, during a workshop aimed at educating the public about the proposed Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS) for the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area (GKMA), Mr Dieter Schilling, a World Bank official, said the implementation of the project would commence within six years.
“The earliest time for the operationalisation of the project is 2014,” he told the meeting at Statistics House in Kampala.
The then Minister for Works, Housing and Communication, Mr John Nasasira, and some civic and political leaders from Kampala were in attendance.

The BRTS had been proposed in the National Transport Master Plan (NTMP), including a transport master plan for the GMKA, which had been launched by the Works ministry to be implemented between 2009 and 2023.
The master plan was meant to address the numerous transport challenges in Kampala City.
Drawing up the master plans for the city and country had been partially informed by the provisions of Vision 2025 and the working draft of its successor document, Vision 2035, which included public transport infrastructure, especially in urban areas.
It focused on “the need to have a more integrated, efficient and comfortable transport network.”

Vision
The BRTS was envisioned to provide speedy buses with a capacity to carry a huge number of people. Documents, which Daily Monitor has seen show 18-metre buses with a capacity to carry at least 150 passengers.
The frequency was meant to be very high with 30 buses plying the routes every hour.
The buses needed to be low- levelled to allow quick boarding and alighting.
During that consultative meeting, Mr Schilling said requests for the proposals for the prefeasibility study would be called in by the end of that month (February) and that the bank would receive them by the end of March.

He said the contracts for the study would be signed in April 2009, paving way for the commencement of the study in May.
A final report of the study was expected to be released by the end of August 2009 to pave way for the actors to put in place the necessary equipment and resources in order to facilitate the commencement of the 2014.
The project was initially meant to be overseen by the Ministry of Works, but later handed over to KCCA.
It is almost five years since the project was meant to have kicked off, but nothing much has been done.

A KCCA report released in 2012 indicated that the initial problem had to do with the time allocated for the study.
The report states that whereas the World Bank had provided funding for the prefeasibility studies for the development of a long-term integrated BRTS, they were finalised in May 2010.
However, the biggest challenge is the conflicts between KCCA and the Ministry of Works.
In July 2017, the State Minister for Transport, Mr Aggrey Bagiire, told journalists in Tanzania where he had just visited the Dar-es-Salaam Rapid Transport (DART) project, credited for improving the country’s commercial capital, that government would implement a similar project to decongest Kampala City.

“I have seen how this project works and I am very impressed. It is not the question of whether we are going to think about it, we are going to implement it immediately,” he said.
In October last year, KCCA unveiled the Multi-Modal Urban Transport Master Plan, part of the second phase of the Kampala Institutional and Infrastructural Development Project (KIIDP). The five-year $183.7m (Shs693b) World Bank-funded project is intended to phase out boda bodas (motorcycle taxis) from Kampala and replace them with buses, light trains and cable cars.
On June 17, 2017, President Museveni signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a consortium of Chinese investors to implement the RBTS.

Transport: Passengers alight from one of the Pioneer Buses which ply Kampala metropolitan routes. More buses are expected in under the master plan. FILE PHOTO

Impact
The Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (MATA), headed by a Board, was one of the bodies KCCA was supposed to implement.
It would comprise representatives from the Ministry of Works and Transport, the Ministry of Finance, Police, representatives from local governments in Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area and transport operators.
The body would, with authority from the Multi-Sector Regulatory Transport Authority (MTRA), take charge of the enforcement of regulatory provisions such as licensing, economic regulation and provision of transport-related legal services.
The Transport Master Plan also envisaged that another body, the Metropolitan Area Transport Executive (MATE), which was to comprise experts in planning, finance, engineering and transport operations, would be created to work as a think tank to plan infrastructure investments.

The autonomous body was answerable to the chairperson of MATA.
MATE was meant to tackle the inadequate coordination between various actors in the transport sector and what has since become chronic poor planning and deviation from or abandonment of various activities and operations that have previously been planned to solve some of the transport challenges in the city.
But all the institutions the plan had envisaged have never been constituted, leaving the city in a mess.

Disorder
Taxis, private cars and boda bodas continue to be the main modes of transport around Kampala city.
This is coupled with narrow roads and indiscipline of motorists.
Whereas there are some buses that belong to Pioneer Easy Bus Company plying some of city’s routes, buses are still an unpopular mode of transport and their number remains too small to serve a big percentage of the city’s population.

The train service is intermittent and confined to the route between Kampala and Namanve on the city outskirts. Even then, it operates in the mornings before 9am and in the afternoon after 5pm.
One of the causes of the mess is inconsistency of planners, implementers and politicians.
Where the planners and implementers had planned to, for example, introduce prohibitive tolls to regulate the number of private vehicles entering the city and introduction of a regulatory framework to monitor the boda bodas, the matter is politicised.

About master plan
The new Multi-Modal Urban Transport Master plan for the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area is set to undercut the city’s traffic jam. Under the plan, KCCA will construct and operate a robust Mass Rapid System with buses, Light Rail Transit and cable cars by 2040. The plan, yet to be launched by the city authority, was drawn by ROM Transportation Engineering, Cambridge Systematics and TNM consultancies was undertaken between July 2016 and May 2018. Mr Jacob Byamukama, the KCCA’s deputy director for roads management, says the plan is in line with the Kampala physical Development Plan, which aims at creating a well-organised and modern urban metropolitan transport system.

The official position

Mr Samuel Serunkuuma, the acting KCCA deputy executive director, told Daily Monitor on Thursday last week that the project is still in the pipeline. “So far, we have not yet launched anything in line with the Bus Rapid Transport System. What we have launched is in line with the non-motorised transport, but the bus project is still on the cards. It will now be under us (KCCA) and the Ministry of Works because it cannot be confined to Kampala alone,” Mr Serunkuuma said. “Right now, jams stretch up to Nansana, Kiira and Mukono. If you confine the project to Kampala, you will not have done much to ease the problems of congestion in the city,” he added. KCCA developed a Transport Master Plan for the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area, which if implemented will allow the operation of a robust Mass Rapid Transit System with buses, rail, and cable cars by 2040. It will require infrastructure that will encourage walking, cycling and taking buses. Under the plan, the authority will open up non-motorised corridors, which will be accessible to only pedestrians and cyclists.

Monitor position

One of the biggest setbacks in the fight against decongesting Kampala has been the failure of politicians to subordinate their political interests to those of the people they represent. President Museveni has fallen short of ensuring regulation of boda boda operators while the Lord Mayor, Mr Erias Lukwago, has called for relocation of vendors to markets before they are evicted from the streets. The interests of the wider public is to see boda bodas regulated and vendors off the streets but this needs politicians to step aside and allow technocrats do their work.

The authorities should ensure that some of the bodies that were proposed under the Kampala Capital City Authority Act and the National Transport Master Plan (NTMP), including a Transport Master Plan for the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area are, constituted. The Metropolitan Planning Authority, Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area Transport Authority, the Multi-Sector Regulatory Transport Authority and the Metropolitan Area Transport Executive are essential in decongesting Kampala and effectively implementing plans such as the BRTS and the Multi-Modal Urban Transport Master plan.