This will sound like a broken record, but I'll repeat: vehicles don't cause accidents, people do
Vehicles do not cause accidents, drivers do, so why are we going to spend a huge amount of time and cost on inspecting all private vehicles (even brand new ones), instead of on driver training and testing and improving the diligence and integrity of traffic policemen? I know some countries regularly inspect older vehicles, but they do it honestly. Here, we inspect brand new vehicles and even then it is money, not roadworthiness that secures a pass. Countries with 20 times as many vehicles as us have fewer accidents. Have the authorities asked themselves why this is the case? Please tackle this issue
Chris
(This question has been paraphrased for brevity):
I have done so, so many times for more than 40 years. And now, so have you.
Perhaps it is time for a reality check: there is surely no possibility whatsoever that anybody does not already know what goes on “out there” everywhere, all day. And that includes the people who make road transport policy, the people who make road traffic and vehicle laws, the people who teach and test driver competence, and the people assigned to enforce the rules and protect law-abiding motorists. They also know how and why lawlessness prevails. We must also presume that the current position meets the objectives of these people, and the people who elect them, the people who pay them, and the people who manage them. Pointing out the defects, yet again, adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge.
The current situation exists for many different reasons, some of which we know, some of which we don’t. Some of those unknown reasons may be good, or at least a lesser evil than any available alternative. The so-called “policy pie” is an extraordinarily complex dish. Even if all 50 million plus of us had and shared the exact and full facts, we might have millions of different opinions on which remedies were more useful, or desirable, or effective, or essential.
The scant consolation is that Kenya is not an exception in these matters. Have you watched the world news recently? Our little corner has its anomalies and delinquencies and even some tooth-gnashing exasperations, but on balance and in comparison, we live here relatively happily and by personal choice.
Our task is to persistently (and patiently!) do what we can to make things even better. On motoring issues, an organisation to represent the views and interests of all motorists would be helpful. The one we used to have seems to have abandoned its original mandate.
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Kenya burns 100,000 barrels of oil per day, but that’s just 0.1 per cent of global supply
Hi,
What is Kenya’s contribution to global carbon emissions from vehicles?
Geraldine
Traffic build-up on Thika Road on March 16, 2023.
A negligible proportion, but not nothing. The world’s motor vehicle population is about 1.5 billion. Kenya runs about one in every thousand of those (0.1 percent).
The whole world burns about 100 million barrels of oil…per day! Kenya burns about 100,000. That is also about 0.1 percent - a very small proportion of the global total, but still an awful lot of oil. It places us 76th (out of 214) in the world. The biggest consumers in Africa are Egypt (eight times more than us), South Africa (six times more), Nigeria and Algeria (four times), Lybia (double), and Angola (just a bit more).
On other continents there are 20 countries which consume more than 10 times as much as us, topped by the United States with more than 20 percent of the world total (nearly 200 times more than us in total, and about 20 times more than us per person!) and China with 13 percent (so far). Worldwide, new vehicle production is currently about 66 million per year…but falling. We buy about 0.02 percent of those (one in every five thousand). Imagine 10 football fields covered in new cars. Just one of those vehicles is destined for Kenya. Kenya’s vehicle exhausts are not the purest nor the stinkiest. They are improving in fuel efficiency, but not as fast as they are increasing in numbers…most of which are eight years behind the latest economy curve when they first arrive…so a high proportion are two decades or more out-of-date.
The burgeoning production of electric and hybrid cars will certainly reduce carbon emission levels from use of motor vehicles. At the same time, oil could continue to be used unabated (even increasingly, as is the current case) for other purposes, especially plastics. Ensuring that most remaining fossil fuel reserves remain in the ground, forever, is the world’s biggest political challenge. We have the technology. Do we have the wisdom? And will we (as a multi-national species) take action with enough co-ordinated urgency? BY DAILY NATION
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