Keep up pressure to tame traffic jungle

THE 2 805 vehicles impounded in just four days in Harare, most in central Harare, for a full range of traffic and licencing offences shows up the serious of the problem in Zimbabwe, with very large groups of owners and drivers simply ignoring the law.

Taking the vehicles off the road while the owners and drivers sought themselves out, get up to date with licencing, register their vehicles, pay their taxes and pay their fines for motoring offences might seem drastic, but the soft approaches tried in the past simply saw the vehicles back on the road and the drivers and owners coming up with a myriad of excuses for further delay.

So with the police in the lead, a range of agencies including the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe, the Vehicle Examination Department, The Insurance Council of Zimbabwe, Zinara and Zimra co-ordinated on the blitz, named “Tame the Traffic Jungle”.

What is now needed is for the pressure to be maintained. We have had action taken in the past, with a general tightening up by owners and drivers, but as soon as the special effort passes the bad habits return and we return to near chaos once again.

The breaches in the law found in this week’s blitz vary from the minor to the very serious, with a lot involving deliberate decisions to drive unregistered and unlicenced vehicles, to offer public transport without a licence or approved route or approved area of operations or, for that matter, an approved vehicle.

Kombis can be licenced for public transport, but they have to be roadworthy although not necessarily looking pristine, and their drivers have to be specially licenced for public transport duties.

There are now two major groups of operators and their drivers in Harare who have gone to a lot of trouble to brand their kombis and make sure everyone is properly licensed and all the paperwork is done and fees paid

They have complained in the past that they do go to a lot of trouble to be legal and correct, yet their terminuses are often choked with pirates and these same pirates dance through the traffic, breaking laws, and take away the customers and passengers of the legally upright.

If the present pressure was maintained, obviously more kombi operators would want to join these groups, or if they felt it necessary establish a third organisation that had as its entry test proof that the owner and the service offered was legal.

Having organisations that work provides protection to passengers, which must be the prime consideration although others are important, and provides a conduit whereby complaints can be made and contact with the authorities maintained.

There have been suggestions that taking firm action against mushikashika and kombis that are not registered for public transport would seriously harm the commuting public.

There would be some inconvenience at first, but generally as the pirates and mavericks conform the nuisance would abate, and more importantly passengers would prefer modest inconvenience if the services saw a drastic improvement.

Public transport within Harare and much of Zimbabwe relies heavily on the private sector, often the owners of a handful of kombis or even just one kombi, but this does not require an unregulated free-for-all.

Some rules and some of the route regulations do need adjustment.

For example it is difficult for a kombi owner to set up special routes that do not require a change of buses in the city centre, and routes need to include routes that connect the arterial roads rather than just use the arterial roads.

But these can be sorted out if most operators belong to a large organisation that can self-police a lot of the time and can thus give the required assurances to the Government regulators.

Mushikashika are considered a menace by many, but they do provide a service, especially with the lack of timetable services by licensed operators. Many of these try and fill their vehicle at one end of a route and empty it the other end. This makes it difficult for those who live along the route to stop a kombi and climb aboard.

It might be possible to license mushikashika, perhaps as class two taxis, so that the passengers become people sharing a taxi rather than exploited commuters.

With vehicles properly licenced and insured as taxis, along with adequate identification so people do not get robbed by someone exploiting the present system, some sort of temporary arrangement might be possible.

The major tax avoidance measures, people not registering vehicles, people cheating on values when registering, people not bothering to keep Zinara licences up to date and the like can be kerbed with repeated checking.

Driving offences are now rampant and even the most respectable drivers break the law almost every time they drive a few hundred metres, jumping red lights, swerving between lanes, creating fake extra lanes on the verges, and the like.

This is how most urban accidents occur, and for every accident there must be dozens of potential accidents that only the quick reactions of an innocent driver managed to avert.

The police seem to have put in place adequate measures to ensure that potentially corrupt police officers are not bribed, and there are even some kombi drivers complaining of this outbreak of honesty since they had become so accustomed to just waving money around to get out of trouble.

The national complaints desk and other measures are obviously working.

Sorting out the traffic jungle does require universal adherence to the rules, although these rules should be examined with care if they do not concern safety, where compromise cannot be tolerated, to see if the realities of present day Zimbabwe are acknowledged, at least for temporary periods.

But rule changes by regulators do retain the regulation, while everyone or large blocks of people ignoring the rules does lead to a “traffic jungle” that needs to be tames.