Want to make the roads safer? Raise speed limits

When I was a young university student in the early 2000s, the late C. Stanley Kamana was my favourite journalist. Every Thursday morning I picked up my favourite newspaper, and immediately turned to Page 3 where his articles were featured. His was a highly riveting style – if something was stupid, he was the man who could be depended on to tell how astonishingly stupid that thing was.

Once there was an accident where a freight container fell on a daladala along Sam Nujoma Road in Dar es Salaam, and killed some people. Following the accident, Kamana wrote an article where he described the situation Tanzanians faced. While referring to major accidents of the time, he showed how people were dying in trains going forward, trains sliding backwards, in capsizing ships, in bus collisions, and when containers fell on their buses too. It looked like whatever option they chose, they ended up dying anyway.

I am reminded of Kamana, and the container incident after the tragic accident on March 28, 2022 that killed a prominent intellectual in Tanzania, Prof Honest Ngowi. He died when the driver of a lorry lost control, and the container it was carrying fell on Prof Ngowi’s vehicle, killing him and his driver. The professor’s death is tragic. As exceptional as he already was, his future looked even brighter. Yet another traffic accident in Tanzania has robbed the nation of one of its brightest shining stars.

Tanzania has a dramatically high rate of traffic accidents. According to the 2018 WHO report, Tanzania ranked in the top ten globally on the number of traffic accidents, and casualties. This is despite having only 21 vehicles per 1,000 people, a miniscule figure compared to other nations. Probability of death by accident in Tanzania is very high – about 1 in 20.

So, what makes Tanzania so notorious for traffic accidents?

Combing through multiple sources, one gets a list of the usual suspects – overloading, speeding, poor infrastructure, drunk driving, physical exhaustion, etc. While all these are valid reasons, they are not sufficient to explain why so many accidents happen in Tanzania. As a result, many of the solutions deployed, say, equipping long-distance buses with speed governors, and deploying more traffic officers on the way, don’t address the real causes.

It is my opinion that the solution to reducing road accidents in Tanzania’s highways is to increase speeds rather than reduce them.

A bus journeying between Dar es Salaam and Iringa covers a distance of about 490 kilometres. While passengers are treated with stunning vistas of natural beauty along the way, including views of Udzungwa Mountains and Mikumi National Park, they are often on edge, considering the risky manoeuvres drivers make on the road, and the time journeys take.

At average highway speeds of 80kph and 100kph, the journey would take six and five hours, respectively. However, in practice, that journey takes a minimum of eight hours, that is, at a maximum speed of 60kph.

This is how that journey unfolds: Dar to Morogoro, 200km, time taken is five hours. That is an average speed of 40kph. Then, the next 300km or so for three to four hours at 100kph. But averages are very misleading. For example, in practice, 40kph means spending possibly three hours in traffic at 10 to 20kph before bursting to speeds of up to 120kph. Similarly, 100kph means anything between 30kph and 140kph. Those huge speed bursts often occur through violation of road safety rules in one journey.

That is where the danger is. Sadly, one can say with certainty that it is only a matter of time before another tragedy arrives.

While statistics on the number of vehicles in Tanzania are all over the place, some sources indicate that Tanzania has 86,000 lorries and 49,000 buses. These vehicles compete for highway space with each other, and 1.35 million other vehicles. Given that towns are allowed to grow unhindered along those highways, average speeds are often quite low, before drivers drive at devil-may-care speeds.

That means that Tanzania doesn’t have highways. What we call highways are highways by name only.

As a result, drivers take many unnecessary risks to achieve very modest speeds. No wonder, even by our massaged figures, lorries contribute close to 20 percent of traffic accidents. Most of the reasons we raise are secondary causes. A driver who is going to Lusaka, or Lubumbashi, who wastes about five hours or more on a 200km stretch of a highly congested and highly policed highway will definitely try to compensate for the lost time by other means.

A highway is a highway – there must be a limit to how slow people can go. The government must ensure that users achieve reasonably faster speeds without having to break every traffic rule when no one watching.

This implies effective governance. Since cities congest highways for long distances, they should be planned appropriately. Since highways are too narrow, they should be widened to create room for manoeuvres when needed. Too many interactions with heavy lorries and buses? Build roads with four lanes or more. Too many lorries slowing down traffic, and increasing risk of accidents? It’s time for railways to make a comeback.

If you have relatively fewer vehicles on the roads travelling at legally prescribed safe but faster speeds, there will be fewer incentives to take unnecessary risks. Most importantly, this is how we can end the cat-and-mouse games between drivers and the police, with innocent people paying the price.