Thika Road and Mombasa Road are some of the six corridors into the city identified by the authorities in a bid to reduce traffic jams.
The Kenya National Highways Authority (Kenha), which mapped out the city roads that will have the dedicated lane, said high capacity buses will be allowed on the red lanes.
Thika Road is the first of six roads to have a special lane set aside and is part of a plan that will also involve the expansion of existing roads, as some of them are still basic single-lanes.
Thika and Mombasa roads are set to have single lanes dedicated for buses that carry more than 80 passengers as the Transport ministry moves to ease vehicle movement into the capital, Nairobi.
The two roads are some of the six corridors into the city identified by the authorities in a bid to reduce traffic jams.
Transport Cabinet Secretary James Macharia said he will publish in the Kenya Gazette rules on how the lanes will be used, among them a requirement for personal and small-capacity vehicles to keep off the special lanes.
“I’m going to gazette the rules. If you drive your car on it you will face penalties. You will be fined,” he said after a meeting with the Senate’s Roads Committee.
The Kenya National Highways Authority (Kenha), which mapped out the city roads that will have the dedicated lane, said high capacity buses will be allowed on the red lanes.
“The innermost lanes on the above roads (Thika Road and Mombasa Road), marked in red, will be dedicated to the Bus Rapid Transport to facilitate easy movement of high capacity buses carrying over 80 passengers,” Kenha said in a statement on Thursday.
Mr Macharia said the lane will also be used by emergency vehicles such as ambulances and police vehicles and by vehicles carrying the sort of Very Very Important Persons (VVIPs) that sometimes necessitate the closure of roads.
Thika Road is the first of six roads to have a special lane set aside and is part of a plan that will also involve the expansion of existing roads, as some of them are still basic single-lanes.
Mr Macharia said the plan would also involve the acquisition of public service vehicles built in the style of Bus Rapid Transport — the high-capacity buses that can transport up to 100 passengers at one go.
“More than 900 buses are required in the six corridors and because we do not have them, we have opened one corridor, the Thika highway. From Thursday, we are starting the demarcation and dedication of that lane,” Mr Macharia told the committee. The plan is to encourage more people to take matatus into the city rather than the personal vehicles.
“That is what we want to see. If they succeed, then we can all leave our cars at home and we use the buses into town,” said Mr Macharia.
Charles Mwaura, Principal Secretary for Urban Planning said the six corridors are: Thika Road, Langata Road, Juja Road, Jogoo Road, Mombasa Road and Waiyaki Way.
With its four lanes and two-lane service lane, Thika Road has the space required to have all the high-capacity passenger vehicles on one side and moving to the Central Business District rapidly.
But the highway’s bottlenecks at Pangani, where the four lanes on the main highway and the two from Kiambu and Muthaiga roads merge into three lanes before opening up in the tunnel into two lanes each on Forest Road and Murang’a Road.
Asked about the bottlenecks, Mr Macharia said: “Those are some of the logistics that we are going to work out.”
Plans for the special lanes has been afoot since 2008.
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