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Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Why the new 3 tier interchange at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle is a bad idea



Kwame Nkrumah circle is a very important area in Accra. It serves as a very central transportation node for most residents and visitors alike in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Its major landmark is the roundabout named after the first president of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
The area has seen a rise in traffic jams over the years, which has been a major source of headache to motorists. At peak hours, it can take up to 45 minutes to 1hr to get past the roundabout from the Major roads that connect to it. There have been passionate calls for governments and city authorities to do something about the traffic congestion especially by motorists, both private and commercial as well as everyday commuters who have to use the route day in and day out. In response to these calls and in fulfilment of a campaign promise, the president has commissioned the construction of a three tier interchange as a solution. See the video below for details of the design.

At face value, this solution looks like a very beautiful idea and in fact it will definitely ease the congestion and for a pretty long time. I think however that in the long term, anyone who is a proponent of sustainable urban design would raise an eyebrow to this. It is however not surprising though, that very little concern has been raised against this because after all, this goes to buttress the typical Ghanaian attitude of short term measures to resolve immediate problems without a critical assessment of future implications. As a student of urban design, these are my concerns about why I think this is a bad idea.

Firstly, we seem to think that building more and wider roads and interchanges is the best solution to increasing traffic congestion. It is indeed a solution that works well especially for the outskirts of cities like in the case of Mallam, Achimota, Legon etc where densities are lower and human scale activities are minimal or close to non-existent. However, for inner city areas such as Kwame Nkrumah Circle area with very high densities of people with human scale activities such as pedestrian shopping, boarding of vehicles, entertainment and high end commercial activity such as banks, shops etc. that is a bad idea. What we really need to be considering is how to get people to or past the area while reducing the number of cars. This is essentially what mass public transportation systems such as the BRT, Trams and Monorail systems are very successful at doing. The point made here is that, rather than trying to build more roads to accommodate more cars, which will end up getting congested in the future because number of cars will increase with time, we should be thinking of ways to remove more and more cars from the road in favour of convenient, fast and reliable public transport systems. My question to the supporters of the presidents idea is that, when the traffic congestion comes back again, at a greater intensity in the future, say, 2030, which it will, are we going to add more flyovers to the existing design to ease traffic then, and if yes, for how long can we keep doing that, how sustainable does that sound? If no, then there have to be more sustainable solutions.

Secondly and buttressing the first point, if you ever took the time to stand at circle to count the number of passengers in the jammed vehicles at peak hours, you would find that very few of them are usually full with passengers. In fact, a very high number of the vehicles are occupied by just the driver. This means that the proposed interchange and indeed most interchanges only accommodate more vehicles than actual people  when in fact what is really important is to transport more people with less vehicles the latter case being a more sustainable approach. The picture below illustrates the point.


Thirdly, there is more than enough precedence to illustrate the fact that such massive infrastructures for cars in the long term become liabilities for cities. A classic example is the city of Detroit which at the heart of the automobile built several roads and overpasses and interchanges. Today, Detroit has one of the lowest quality of life in the US with very low economic activity. Another example is in Seoul where they had  to pull down a several kilometre highway built over a river due to unbearable noise levels, pollution, traffic congestion and a general low quality of urban life along the highway to restore the river into a pedestrianized waterfront full of quality urban social activity and a better quality of urban life. The irony in this case is that the highway was built to ease traffic congestion in the first place.

As a fourth point, Kwame Nkrumah circle has a huge urban heritage and significance to the city of Accra which needs to be preserved. My own dad tells me about how anytime he was in Accra, he relished every opportunity to take a stroll along the Ring road to Circle just to relax at the Holy Garden, which at the time was a beautiful urban park where people could just enjoy some leisure. Others who are old enough will attest to how beautiful a place Kwame Nkrumah circle was in the past and they say so not because of how swiftly one could drive past it, but how relaxing it was to walk through and enjoy the green atmosphere of the area. I think automobiles have done enough damage to the area already and we need to be more concerned about how to restore it to its former glory.


Wednesday, July 31, 2013

The N1 highway; A gift or a curse? Pt2



Confusion at Mallam Interchange
This might not be too much of a problem for everyday users but for first time users, it sure is and I for one have fallen victim to this confusion before. If you are driving towards Mallam interchange from the Awoshie area along the highway for the first time and you are suddenly confronted with the interchange, how do you decide which of the three lanes to take especially at the kinds of speed that the highway affords its users. There are three main lanes, one to the far right which goes down the interchange to to Mallam proper which you are first confronted with. A few meters from that, there is the middle right lane which takes you up the interchange and down to meet the Winneba road towards Kasoa, then there is the left lane which takes you up the hill and down in the opposite direction Towards Kaneshie. 

Google earth image of the Mallam interchange
 
Well! I am able to describe it so well because I am an everyday user but for the first time user this is usually a confusing decision to make at high speed since there is absolutely no way of telling which of the lanes goes where while a wrong decision means that you end up going towards Kasoa when you intended to go to Mallam or vice versa or going towards Kaneshie when you intended to go to Kasoa or vice versa. In the second pair of cases especially, you have to travel close to another kilometre in order to make a legal U-turn. This is a recipe for disaster and I would not be surprised at all if there have been some accidents recorded there already due to motorists attempting to make the right turn in the last minute at such high speeds. Below is a short animation to illustrate the point. Take note of the white SUV with the red arrow on top.


Short animation to illustrate the point. Take note of the white SUV with the red arrow on top.
In the video above, a first time driver takes the middle lane that take you over, then down towards Kasoa. Notice there are no signs to indicate which lane to take so the passenger who is obviously familiar with the place has to warn him in advance.
The solution
Well! This situation calls for a very simple intervention and once again I stress that it does not involve rocket science. In fact, I’m tempted to believe that it is only due to negligence that this has not been done already and it would be very sad if anybody has had to, or will have to lose his or her life due to such negligence. A simple road sign should do the magic and prevent needless accidents. Here is an illustration of what I mean.
 
Above is an illustration of how a simple overhead sign can warn motorists beforehand

The N1 highway; A gift or a curse? Pt1



Most drivers from the western-most suburbs of Accra would see the N1 highway as a blessing. Indeed it is considering the ease with which one can now get to or from town in less than thirty minutes as opposed to when one had to spend two to three hours on the road to or from town. The N1 highway has made life a lot easier for drivers and we do owe a depth of gratitude to those responsible for its construction. Being an everyday user myself over the last few months of its completion, however, I have observed several issues with the highway some of which are very obvious, others not so obvious to those unaffected by them. Being an architect and at the moment an urban design student, I think I owe it a duty to my nation to point out some of these problems and to go ahead to propose my ideas of solutions to those issues. I believe that image is everything and as such I shall try to as much as possible put my ideas in pictorial form so that readers can understand them even better and I shall love to hear your feedback on my ideas. The two major issue I have identified have got to do with the following.
  1. Lack of enough and appropriate pedestrian crossing
  2. Confusion among motorists at the Mallam interchange
Apart from problems, however, I have identified some opportunities that the highway presents with respect to more efficient public transport systems and I shall talk about these and make proposals in that regard as well.
Pedestrian Crossing
I have always been baffled about why the designers of the highway would create only a few foot bridges on this really long stretch of highway and worst of all locate them at areas where pedestrian activity is minimal as opposed to areas like the Abeka-Lapaz or Kwashieman junctions where quite obviously there are and always have been a lot of pedestrians crossing the road. As is quite often the excuse in this country, I gather it has something to do with lack of enough resources. The big question however, is that, if there were only enough resources to build a few footbridges, why not put them where they are most needed.
Above is a Google earth image illustrating the distance between footbridges and major busy areas
Secondly, it is quite baffling to me how these footbridges are designed without any regard for the disabled, especially the paraplegic, wheelchair users and the elderly. It is quite worrying that in this day and age with all the talk about the disability law which was passed quite recently and how to not marginalize such people in society, such a grievous mistake can be made on such a huge scale. I leave it to one’s imagination how such people get across this highway. Sad! Isn’t it?  Now the question is, if the mistake has been made, can we not do anything to remedy the situation? I think we can. There are two possible solutions: Build adjoining ramps or build special mechanical lifts as attachment to existing bridges. I personally think mechanical lifts will be a better idea because ramps are too heavy and take up too much space. Correct me if I'm wrong. One might rule out mechanical lifts with the misconception that it involves "rocket science", which is very often the assumption in this country, but this technology has existed for centuries and there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Just take a look at most multi-storey construction sites around and you would find that this technology is being used extensively already in this country.
 
Above is an illustration of how a mechanical lift can easily be attached to the existing bridges to take care of wheelchair users as well as elderly citizens. I'm sure a few ingenious mechanical engineers can easily put this together. Would love to work with anyone interested to design a workable lift for this so please contact me if you are interested. Watch this space for updates to the design. This is just a mock-up of the idea.

Is it any wonder that you find pedestrians crossing the highway dangerously despite the wall that were built to prevent that? After-all, any urban designer will admit that as a rule of thumb, most people are comfortable walking 400m, approximately, 5 minutes to get what they need and so we cannot expect anyone to be comfortable walking up to 1km, approximately 12.5 minutes just to climb up a five meter high footbridge and make it across an almost 20m wide highway. I dare to say you can hardly get everyone to comply even in the most disciplined of societies. I believe there is the need for more footbridges at the appropriate locations and most importantly they need to be well designed with a more human face than was done with the existing ones. Watch this space for my take on a more human centered design of a footbridge.

Introduction

I grew up in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Over the years, i have become more and more passionate about cities. It started with my fascination with buildings and architecture which gradually led to me studying architecture in the university. While studying architecture, it became clearer and clearer over the years that, the urban environment in which buildings exist have a very big role to play in how buildings function and how people interact with them. This realization has led to my keen interest in urban planning and design which are in my opinion, even more important than architecture. I believe that once we have got our urban environments working properly, architecture will naturally follow suite. This belief was instigated through my first visit to London where i realized that London was not a great city because of the old traditional buildings that it is mostly made of, which were obviously not always built with the best of architectural principles, but that it was a great city because of how much attention that has been paid in the design of the public realm. The parks, the streets, the transportation systems, the public squares, the shopping centers and so on. So now, I am a student of urban design, with aspirations towards being able to help reshape our cities into more sustainable cities which provide the basic needs for the entire spectrum of their inhabitants and this blog is only the beginning of my contribution towards this cause. My name is Hassan Salih and I am a Ghanaian Urbanist.

Disclaimer
I do not in anyway claim to be a qualified urban designer and that my ideas are the best. This blog is only a platform to express my personal opinions about urban issues in Ghana. The solutions I propose on this blog are my ideas based on common sense, sometimes novel, sometimes borrowed from other sources in which case I shall always provide the necessary references and links. Please feel free to post comments, criticize me if you disagree with me, but please be civil about it when you do. Thanks.