500,000 Nairobians waste Sh80bn in traffic jams?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

06 September 2009

Two weeks ago, I discussed how to estimate the amount of fuel wasted by cars waiting in traffic jams in Nairobi. It turned out that about 60,000 vehicles are held up for at least four hour every day in the city burning approximately Sh24 billion worth of petrol annually. Now that’s just one part of the problem. There is another part that is a little trickier to work out, namely, the value of the time wasted by the drivers and their passengers.

The starting point in evaluating this second wastage is to estimate the number of people in each vehicle. There are quite a good number of cars with just the driver riding alone but there are also many public service vehicles with tens of people inside. Now we can say that the average is halfway between one person and 30 which gives about 16 people per vehicle; but sounds too high!

To get a better value, I counted the number of people inside the vehicles held up on a short stretch of road recently. There were 11 cars and three 30-seater PSVs in the queue. In total there were 112 people in the jam. Thus the average occupancy was 8 people per vehicle.

Though that was not a very comprehensive study, I will proceed with that result. Thus, every working day, 60,000 vehicles carrying 8 people each are held up for four hours. That’s a total of 480,000 people – almost half a million!

Having established that, the next problem is to estimate the monetary value of the time wasted. Four hours per working day comes to about 1,000 hours every year. This farther works out to 125 working days per year or about six months!

Now I am not suggesting that these people spend half their working life in the jam; no! What this means is that if the traffic flow was smooth, Nairobians would have more sleeping time and therefore would work more efficiently and productively. Perhaps 30 percent more than what they are producing at the moment.

To get the monetary value of this wasted time, we need to estimate the average income of the people held up in the jam. Bearing in mind that there is a salary below which one cannot afford to go to work in a vehicle (public or private), my guess is that those in the vehicles earn an average of Sh25,000 per month…some earn more than this and other get less.

Now, if there were no traffic jams, these 500,000 people would be 30 percent more productive. This means that they would save their employers about Sh7,500 each in salaries. This works to about Sh3.75 billion per month or Sh45 billion per year.

This Sh45 billion is the additional amount of money that Nairobi employers are paying their workers as a result of the traffic jam. In other words, it wasted money!

Add to that the Sh24 billion worth of fuel wasted by the cars and total comes to Sh69 billion…which we can round of to Sh70 billion. That’s a lot of money especially when we bear in mind that it is lost in one city alone. Clearly then, every effort must be put to ensure that traffic flows smoothly in the city.