NAIROBI’S OUTER RING ROAD TO BECOME DUAL CARRIAGE HIGHWAY
(Posted 31st August 2014)
One of Nairobi’s remaining traffic bottlenecks, the Outer Ring Road, which allows to bypass the city centre and connect traffic coming from Central Kenya to the international airport and the main highway to Mombasa and the Tanzanian border at Namanga, is due to be upgraded from single lane to dual lane. The new Outer Ring Road will also link to at least two of the new bypasses which are being constructed, to further ease bypassing the city’s centre and main business hubs of CBD and Westlands.
It was learned late yesterday that the government has now signed a contract with a Chinese company which was also involved in building the superhighway to Thika and that construction of the widening and upgrading of the Outer Ring will take three years to complete.
Financed by the African Development Bank to the tune of nearly 116 million US Dollars – the Kenyan government is contributing over 11 million US Dollars to the construction – will the new highway design also create proper interchanges, dropping the bottleneck roundabouts where often traffic slows down to snail’s pace.
Added elements under the contract were named as the creation of a tree corridor along the new road, the construction of several health centres along the 13 kilometre road and the establishment of several small business hubs where the informal sector can find a ‘home’ after being displaced from the road reserves when construction goes underway.
Provided that losing bidders are not launching legal challenges, could construction start early next year, which would see the project completed by early 2018.
Kenya has stood out in the region with the construction of a series of new highways and bypasses around the capital Nairobi to battle perennial traffic congestion with improvements already benefitting commuters, unlike Dar es Salaam where similar measures are only now beginning to unfold to in particular decongest the main access from the city to the international airport. In Uganda, sections of the new highway from Kampala to Entebbe are now under construction but the relatively new Northern Bypass around the city, is already in need to be upgraded to dual carriage, while the option for a Southern Bypass is now all but buried after the route, proposed in the 1990’s but never gazetted, has now been developed with residential housing and commercial buildings.
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