HARARE Mayor Jacob Mafume has renewed calls for residents to embrace public transport, saying that the capital's worsening traffic congestion will only deteriorate unless more people abandon private vehicles for buses.
Speaking at the Transparent International Zimbabwe (TI-Z) Integrity and Accountability Summit Tuesday, Mafume said the city was rapidly becoming unnavigable as the number of cars on the roads continued to rise.
"Harare is no longer navigable. It is now a traffic jam. It could be worse and it's going to get worse if we don't do something," he said.
Mafume blamed the congestion on the growing number of vehicles owned by individual households, saying it had become common for several family members to drive separate cars for short trips.
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"Everyone is buying a car. The wife, the husband, the son, the gardener, the maid and the relative. You've got five cars at a household. All of them leave," he said.
He said many residents were driving into the city for activities that could be undertaken closer to home, unnecessarily adding pressure to Harare's road network.
To ease congestion, the mayor said the city was backing a private sector initiative that will introduce 200 buses for urban public transport.
According to Mafume, the buses have already been purchased by entrepreneurs and are currently being shipped to Zimbabwe.
Africans& Diaspora"The 200 buses are already on ships. So the buses are coming," he said.
He said the investors had approached both his office and the responsible ministry seeking to deploy the fleet in Harare, a proposal authorities had welcomed.
"And we welcomed the move because if we are going to have 200 buses, we are going to have a lot of people out of the cars as a pilot project," Mafume said.
He stressed that the buses had been financed by the private sector rather than residents or the local authority.
Mafume said the long-term objective was to shift commuters away from informal transport operators and into reliable mass public transport.
"We need that for getting people out of Mushikashika, out of transportation, into public mass transport," he said.
Drawing comparisons with Singapore, Mafume said strict vehicle ownership policies and efficient public transport systems had helped keep congestion under control, adding that Zimbabwe must also prioritise mass transit to make Harare more navigable
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