Vehicle inspection charges set for review after 22 years

The National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) is set to review its commercial vehicles inspection fees, which currently stand at Sh1,000.

NTSA director-general Francis Meja said the agency engage the public in plans to review the fees in the coming weeks, with an increase likely to be on the cards, especially for commercial vehicles.

Currently, the prescribed fee is Sh1,000 for all category of vehicles regardless of class, size and type.

“This has been necessitated by the fact that the fee was last reviewed 22 years ago (in 1995) and in view of this, there is a need to review of the current fee for all categories of motor vehicles,” he told the Business Daily.

“The cost currently incurred to by the authority to inspect a motor vehicle is much more than the fee charged.”

The NTSA is mandated to conduct motor vehicle inspection and certification but different insurance companies also do so before issuance of cover or paying out claims.

The agency took over this role from the police in 2013 during the transition to the devolution.

The public forums have been categorised into four regions to cover Nakuru, Nyeri, Mombasa and Nairobi from Wednesday to November 21 (next Tuesday).

The public in Nakuru would meet at the Nuru Palace Hotel, while those in Nyeri, Mombasa and Nairobi would gather at Green Hills Hotels, Kenya School of Government and the Kenyatta International Convention Centre respectively.

This comes as the NTSA is set to modernise its inspection centres at a cost of Sh2 billion to improve service delivery.

The move aims to increase the authority’s inspection capacity from the current 400,000 vehicles per year to two million vehicles annually.

NTSA inspection director Gerald Wangai said the upgrade includes the purchase of new equipment and improving current infrastructure. 

READ: All cars older than four years for fresh inspection

“The modernisation process would go a long way in reducing the waiting time between inspection of a vehicle and provision of a status report to 30 minutes,” he said.

“Many of the inspection sites we inherited from the police in 2013 were in poor state hence the reason why we want to refurbish them to increase efficiency and effectiveness.”

The upgrade is being done in phases and has already started in on Mombasa Road and Likoni Road in Nairobi before being rolled out countrywide.
This comes as the proposed smart traffic control system for Nairobi is expected to go live in just over two years.

Officials said in October that the plan seeks to ease congestion on key city roads at an estimated cost of Sh1.88 billion.

Dubbed the Nairobi Intelligent Traffic System (ITS), the plan is 80 per cent funded by the World Bank and is benchmarked on the traffic flow management in the UK.

The ITS project will see traffic control technologies such as intelligent traffic lights, road markings and signage installed at 100 of about 400 intersections during its first phase.

German mobility firm HP Gauff, its traffic engineering counterpart Schlothauer & Wauer and UK’s Wyg International, won the Sh480 million consultancy deal in January to develop a draft design for the project.