Our public transport needs a quick rethink

Travelers jostle to board buses in downtown Kampala on June 8, 2021. PHOTO/ ABUBAKER LUBOWA 

What you need to know:

The issue: 
Public transport. 

Our view:  
What this week’s experience should teach us is that government needs to regulate the private transport services to weed out opportunism and lack of experience.

Images of students stranded in bus parks for days will be one of the hallmarks of the 2021 Covid-19 lockdown.
President Museveni had over the weekend reinstated restrictions to curb the coronavirus infections as the second wave descends on Uganda.
One of the measures was to immediately close all learning institutions and send millions of learners home. The other was to restrict inter-district movement of people, and this was to take effect within three days.

What this meant was that our already stretched public transport system was expected to cater for the masses of students trying to find their way home, and the thousands of city dwellers running back to their home towns in fear of what could unfold as the 42-day lockdown starts.
For months now, buses and taxis have been forced to operate at half capacity to allow for social distancing in public transport as government tries to find a solution for the menacing pandemic.

But the Tuesday NTV live coverage of the head of State House Anti-Corruption Unit, Col Edith Nakalema, trying to coordinate transport at the bus park  late in the night tells of what government should have done a long time ago.
Left to the private sector, public transport has been all but chaotic. And this has been the story since the Uganda Transport Company was sold off by government in the early 90s.
Col Nakalema on Tuesday caused the arrest of bus owners and forced the operators to refund fares in case were they overcharged travellers. For a long time, travellers have been left at the mercy of the private sector.

This has given transport operators, especially the taxis, a lot of power. The fares seem to change at the whims of the person in charge of the taxi. The fares sometimes double, or even triple, for the same distance in a single day.
Then we have had the cases of drivers being overworked by bus owners, resulting in fatigue. We have had stories of drivers being forced to move from Kampala to Arua and back, that is more than 900kms. Although government eventually came up with guidelines on these long routes, a lot of lives had already been lost to these fatal accidents.

What this week’s experience should teach us is that government needs to regulate the private transport services to weed out opportunism and lack of experience.
Finally, government has in the past announced plans to diversify modes of public transport to means such as better railway transport, and introduction of the bus rapid transit, among others. It is high time these be treated as urgent.