Deputy Director of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Prof William Ackaah, has said that Ghana cannot continue expanding roads to deal with rising traffic congestion and a growing vehicle population.
Deputy Director of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Prof William Ackaah, has said that Ghana cannot continue expanding roads to deal with rising traffic congestion and a growing vehicle population.
He said the country needed to shift its focus from building more road lanes to developing an efficient public transport system capable of moving large numbers of people while using less road space.
Speaking on the Joy FM Super Morning Show on Friday, August 28, as part of the Joy Sustainability Month programme on Ghana’s trotro revolution and the case for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), Prof Ackaah said the current use of Ghana’s road space was highly inefficient.
According to him, about 60 per cent of passengers rely on trotros, yet the vehicles occupy only about 20 per cent of available road space.
By contrast, he said, private saloon cars carry about 20 per cent of passengers but take up roughly 60 per cent of road space.
“So you cannot build a city based on this. We need to carry people en masse, and so public transport system,” he said.
Prof Ackaah said Ghana’s growing economy and increasing vehicle ownership were putting additional pressure on the country’s road network.
He pointed to the steady expansion of existing roads, with many one-lane roads being widened into two or three lanes, and questioned how long that approach could continue.
“You see, we have our roads. Just looking at the road system, you realise that we are almost changing all our one-lane roads into two lanes, to three lanes. How long are we going to be able to do this?” he asked.
He said the number of vehicles would continue to rise as more people acquired cars and the demand for travel increased.
“The vehicle population keeps on increasing, the needs for people to travel keep on increasing. And with this low carrying vehicle capacity, we cannot go by this,” he said.
For him, the solution cannot simply be to build wider roads or create additional routes.
“We cannot keep on expanding our routes,” he said, saying that road construction was becoming increasingly expensive because of the cost of acquiring land and the right of way needed for expansion.
“If you just look at the road space, it’s very, very expensive when you’re building, when you expand the constraints, acquiring the right of ways and all those, we cannot do that,” he said.
Prof Ackaah said Ghana should instead invest in a reliable and efficient public transport system that could move large numbers of people using significantly less road space.
He identified Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) as one of the systems that could help achieve that objective.
“We need an efficient public transport system, which will carry people en masse,” he said.
He said that the country could make better use of its limited road space by reducing the number of private cars on major roads and replacing them with high-capacity buses.
“We need to take some of our private vehicles, which is just carrying 20% of the people but occupying 60% of the road space, we need to take them off the road and replace them with a public transport system,” he said.
Prof Ackaah explained that the advantage of BRT was not simply that it was another form of public transport, but that it could carry many more passengers in a single vehicle.
Using the example of private cars carrying one or two occupants, he said a BRT bus capable of carrying fewer than 40 passengers could potentially replace a large number of individual vehicles.
“If you take a car, a saloon car, for instance, now if you look at what is happening, you have single occupants, maybe two people carrying in a vehicle,” he said.
“So what it means is that if you take a BRT system, which can carry less than 40 passengers, what it means is that you are taking, if the car, the saloon car, is carrying two people, it means you are taking 20 vehicles, 20 saloon cars, and replacing it with just a BRT, with a bus.”
He said such a shift would reduce the number of vehicles competing for limited road space while allowing the same number of people to travel.
“So you are freeing 20% of the vehicles from the road, and replacing it with just one bus, which means you’ve reduced volume, you’ve reduced pollution, and it becomes efficient,” he said.
Prof Ackaah said a more efficient use of road space would be critical if Ghana was to tackle congestion while also reducing pollution from road transport.
He said the current imbalance, where relatively few private vehicles occupy a large share of road space, was contributing to the pressure on the country’s urban roads.
“For us to make sure that we minimise congestion, we reduce pollution, then we have to have an efficient use of our road space,” he said.
He maintained that BRT and other high-capacity public transport systems could help achieve this by moving more people with fewer vehicles.
“This is how it helps reduce congestion, it helps reduce the travel time, and then it helps reduce the pollution on our roads,” he said.
