Road transport businesses face bleak future in era of fast train

Now that the standard gauge railway is under construction, it is going to produce many opportunities for the country and the hinterland.

The opportunities include speed and lower cost of doing business, modernisation of rail travel, bragging rights for development implied, and reduced cost of road maintenance.

Among the problems that analysts have highlighted include the cost, saying repairing the current meter gauge line would have been the optimal solution.

What has not been highlighted is the effect of the SGR on transport hubs like Mtito Andei, Salama and Salgaa; these are stop-overs for long haul trucks and buses.

What are the implications of SGR on road transport hubs?

Every now and then new technology changes the way we do business, for example the popularity of boda bodas (motorbike taxi) has been associated with increase of obesity in the rural areas.

Before boda boda, people in the rural areas walked for long distances. Today, all a villager needs is to call a boda boda rider even if they don’t have money they can pay later.

Rail transport used to be fuelled by steam and coal, requiring many stops to add coal and water that would generate the steam, so the railway stops would be many.

Those watering and refuelling stops were vibrant driven by the support system needed to supply coal, deliver water, refreshments for passengers, and jobs for blacksmiths and other businesses.

Similar to the steam-driven rail transport, the current road transport system has dominant support systems along the highways. Towns like Salama, Salgaa, Mtito Andei, Mariakani and Mlolongo are heavily supported by long distance road transport.

Many of these towns are hubs of corruption where weighbridges exist, others are like red light districts for truck drivers and are known to have a higher prevalence of HIV while highway robbers use them as their bases.

Last-mile opportunities

On the other hand, many businesses including food, energy drinks like Redbull, miraa, and curios do thriving business in these hubs to cater for the needs of long distance travellers and workers.

NGOs are also active in these hubs, supporting causes such as road safety, HIV education, prevention and awareness programs.

On the introduction of the diesel engines the rail transport changed drastically, the watering and coal supply points became redundant, leading to the death of the steam engine support system hubs.

The Standard Gauge Railway will have a similar impact on long distance transport hubs and anyone operating in these hubs need to think how their businesses will survive the standard gauge.

When completed, the standard gauge railway will be the cheapest, fastest and safest alternative to road transport.

Diversion of cargo and passengers to the railway will mean that the road transport hubs will face a problem of drastically reduced number of customers.

This means the food merchants, red light districts, NGOs, miraa traders, and other businesses in those hubs need to be thinking about the next steps.

Road transporters may find lucrative business in last mile haulage of goods from rail stations. The book Death by Dieselisation explains how diesel rail engines disrupted business and life in the steam engine support hubs.

This would make a good reading for businesses in the road transport sector. The big question: will there be death of road support hubs by ‘standard-gaugisation’?

The writer is the marketing director of SBO Research. [email protected], Twitter @bngahu.