Cars still tops

One of the most disappointing aspects of my recent Africa trips was the discovery that cities are being developed round the needs of cars rather than people.

One of the most disappointing aspects of my recent Africa trips was the discovery that cities are being developed round the needs of cars rather than people. The harsh lessons of the failure of this policy have not been picked up in major cities I visited such as Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, and even Cape Town.

In particular, changes to their street designs are been made increasingly in a way which serves the needs of car drivers, although those are very much in a minority. In Lusaka, for example, we were driven in a taxi down a vast dual carriageway at 8 am in the morning and the road into town was effectively paralysed. We waited for several minutes until the traffic moved, and then it only went in stops and starts until we reached a major roundabout on the edge of the Central Business District. There was little sign of any buses, though there were clearly some informal services, but public transport was virtually non existent.

Yet, the dual carriageway road was clearly fairly new but, as is often the case with such road schemes, it had already filled up. That money could have been spent on trying to create a bus network but despite the publication of a report sponsored by the World Bank in 2024 on how to improve public transport in the Zambian capital, nothing much seemed to have changed. Moreover, outside of the capital, a massive road scheme to create a dual carriageway on the main road north was underway, with clearly hundreds of millions of pounds having already been spent.
In Dar es Salaam, there is an astonishing network of motorways on stilts criss crossing the city and there is an express bus service but from what I could see it was little used because fares are expensive. The motorway network was fairly well used but seemed to provide far more capacity that was presently needed presumably on the expectation of growth. Again buses apart from the new express vehicles, were largely non-existent with people having to rely on the informal Combis. Moreover, a massive bridge, the Tanzanite bridge opened in 2022 connects the city with the affluent Masaki area at a cost of $125m, oddly mostly funded by the South Korean government. It is not even tolled in a country where most roads are dirt and impassable in the rainy season.

I was struck by an article in The Guardian recently which highlighted the lack of transit in most American cities. Someone had totted up what it would cost to bring US cities up to a reasonable standard of public transport and the bill came to an impressive $4.6 trillion, out of reach even of the egregious Musk rat. Of course it will never happen, but it does highlight the fundamental failure of US city planning. People are forced to buy and drive cars for lack of any alternative. Those who can’t or are unable to afford them are effectively isolated from society.

America made the policy decisions creating this system in the early 20^th century. It is a shame seeing African nations repeat these mistakes a hundred years later when so many lessons about sustainable transport and green cities have been learnt.