By: Gideon SACKITEY
In many instances, when you consider the city’s entire transport architecture, you can’t be sure a trip will be completed until you arrive at your destination. Comfort is rare and is not expected or guaranteed.
Efficiency, coordination, certainty and reliability in the urban transport structure we call trotro are not on the menu. For many, change is long overdue. For others, fear greets a desirable change that leaves them nowhere but in the middle.
One of the most important reforms should be a gradual shift toward a contracted operating model.
There is a point at which a transport problem stops being a problem of individual drivers and becomes a problem of system design. A failure of the transport governance structure. Accra has reached that point.
READ ALSO
Trotros have served Ghana remarkably well. But it has come to the end of its days. Mahama Ayariga, Minister of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs last week said government does not intend to collapse the trotro system. But my position is that any perpetuation of the trotro as we know it today is bound to FAIL. It has filled a gap that successive governments have struggled to fill, carrying millions of commuters every day and reaching communities where formal bus services have often been absent. However, the idea that they are indispensable is a disaster.
Indeed, the daily experience of the Accra commuter increasingly exposes the weaknesses of a system in which a public necessity is operated largely according to the immediate commercial dictates and interests of individual vehicle owners, drivers and mates.
The trotros as we have known them over the decades moves people, but does not sufficiently manage mobility. That distinction matters.
Consider the ordinary commuter travelling from Kasoa to Kaneshie, Oyibito Accra who have to ride what we call short-short and have to pay three to four times over the normal fare on the same mini bus? Normally, that should be one continuous movement along a defined corridor. But under Accra current structure, the driver an d his mate are king and rule all they survey.
This practice is not simply irritating. It undermines the basic principle of public transport where a passenger pays a predictable fare for a defined journey or fare zone, not repeatedly negotiate the price of movement.
That is where the Accra Transport Authority (ATA) concept kicks in.
It should be the systems manager. I am told that the Greater Accra Passenger Transport Executive (GAPTE), such a mouthful, was created to operate the ATA. The problem is that it cannot, or rather must not, be a regulator and a player.
The ATA should determine the routes and route rationalisation, set designated stops and terminals, determine service frequency and operating hours, as well as fare zones and approved fares. The ATA would also be responsible for standardisation of vehicle and driver standards and passenger-service standards, enter into performance contracts with operators (bus owner companies) and all the electronic ticket payment platforms. This is not difficult to do. If we have to copy the Transport for London concept, why not?
The ATA would assign an operator to a corridor and be required to provide a defined number of vehicle-kilometres, trips or scheduled services. Payment could then be linked primarily to the service delivered, with incentives for reliability, cleanliness, safety and punctuality.
This would remove one of the strongest incentives behind short-tripping.
If a driver is being paid because the bus has completed its contracted service, there is less reason to abandon a longer journey because a shorter journey offers an immediate opportunity to collect another fare.
The public transport system stops rewarding fragmentation and rewards a completed route.
CONTRA-FLOW: USEFUL BUT NOT THE CURE
The current Aayalolo contra-flow initiative is a useful emergency intervention.
It recognises an important principle that public transport should receive priority on roads if government really wants people to choose public transport.
The current arrangement gives Aayalolo buses dedicated contra-flow lanes on selected corridors during peak periods, with enforcement by traffic authorities. That is a reasonable stop-gap. It should remain exactly that – a stop-gap. Indeed, it should have a clearly defined sunset review. Ninety days should be the first serious review point.
This should be a period for measuring of actual journeys made, passenger numbers, traffic displacement, bus utilization, compliance rates, operating coats and of course commuter satisfaction.
I wished the area of operation were expanded. But that’s just a wish.
If the evidence supports continuation, the pilot can be extended to six months while the permanent network is designed.
What should not happen is for a temporary traffic-management experiment to quietly become the transport policy.
The Author is a Communications Specialist and Urban Transport Renewal Advocate.
