The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has called for prompt actions to implement the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project in the Ashanti Region.
That, he said will help reduce the transportation challenges faced by commuters in Kumasi and other peripheral districts in the Ashanti region. He said the increasing population growth in Kumasi, coupled with increasing business activities, had resulted in congestion, making it difficult for people to move from one location to another.
“We have all these vehicles and transport moving from different locations fighting for space and this does not help with the economic development in the city at all. Everybody is clamoring to go to the city centre by the ‘Trotro,’ and if you calculate in terms of how many hours and the cost in terms of fuel (diesel, petrol) it is costing the economy so much, it is something that we may have to look at. “If we had bus rapid transit earlier, it could have helped with the economic situation,” he stated.
Otumfuo Osei Tutu stated this when a delegation, led by Mr. Ousmane Diagana, Vice President, Western and Central Africa of the World Bank, visited him at the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi. The visit followed a tour by the World Bank officials to the Kumasi Urban Mobility and Accessibility Project corridors at Ejisu and Abuakwa.
The Asantehene indicated that the employment such a project could create was enormous, citing that “movement of goods, passengers and the ease with which we can do business together, is something that we may have to look at seriously.”
According to him, the project planning had been on the drawing board for a long time (since 2015) and it should not wait any longer. He said bureaucracies on the part of some government machineries had caused such delays and described it as “something that I don’t like at all.” The Asantehene called for a social contract with the World Bank to get such projects executed since the politicians may delay in getting those projects implemented.
Again, he petitioned that the project unit and coordinator for the BRT be situated in Kumasi for stakeholders and assemblies who were direct beneficiaries to coordinate well for the successful implementation. Mr. Diagana said the world, especially Africa, was experiencing rapid urbanization as a result of population growth, while climate change was imminent. According to him, Kumasi, as one of the cities with the biggest markets in Africa, needed to modernize its transportation system.
The World Bank was capitalizing on experiences of similar programmes in transportation in parts of Africa, Asia, and America to make the Kumasi project a reality, he assured. Mr. Diagana assured that if the project was approved in Ghana by June this year, it would move faster and address the traffic and human congestion in town.
The Kumasi Urban Mobility and Accessibility Project is in the pre-feasibility stage. It is a 29-kilometer BRT, the two corridors (Ejisu and Abuakwa) have a mid-point at Kejetia. The choice of the corridor was informed by a study conducted by the Department of Urban Roads on pre-feasibility on BRT.
Source: GNA
