Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja’s recent pronouncement that the County would demolish the Ksh 250 million Green Park Terminus was met with loud condemnation from the public who termed the move as insensitive to the plight of taxpayers whose money was used on the project that has never really been put to use.
According to Sakaja, the five-acre piece of land would instead be used to set up modern conference facilities. But most commentators questioned this change of use, noting that the site was a few hundred metres away from the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC), which also had modern conference facilities.
Despite the opposition to Sakaja’s move, the controversial project by the now-defunct Nairobi Metroplitan Service (NMS), which was part of Nairobi integrated urban development master plan and decongestion strategy under which public service vehicles would terminate outside the CBD, appears to have been ill-conceived from the start. A sign of things to come was the traffic chaos witnessed during the trials that were done by the NMS to gauge the efficiency of the new terminus. Public Service operators as well as commuters spent hours especially on Haille Sellasie Avenue. This should have been foreseen at the design stage. Some critics have suggested there could have been a different exit on Kenyatta Avenue though this would mean vehicles traversing Uhuru Park or joining Uhuru Highway somewhere opposite Parliament. The terminus was also seen as too small to accommodate the expected volume of vehicles and human traffic.
Critics see a parallel between this terminus and the proposed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) that began on Thika Highway before stalling. The project faced skepticism from the public right from the start especially after the inner lanes were marked with red paint as reserved for the BRT buses before construction started on the highway’s median. To date, it remains to be seen how the project will be completed without substantially interfering with the design of Thika Highway as unlike in the case of the Nairobi Expressway, Thika Highway does not have a spacious median.
