Cars. Sigh.

I am NOT anti-car!

Let's back up. I don't think I have ever experienced automotive nirvana than when I experienced the full 500bhp of the five-litre V-8 E55 AMG. The green gods forgive me, but there is nothing as wonderful as conquering some steep bits in Simla in the cocoon-ish comforts of a fully loaded six-litre V-12 Tuareg. And I think if I was to live the automotive life that my father has lived, I would definitely put money down for the same DS9 and the Renault 4 he did; in different periods and for different reasons, they were pretty awesome rides. No...I am most certainly not anti-car.

I am, however, pro-pedestrian. That is what an urban setting means: more time in our hands. We are not driving cattle to the river. We are not racing the dawn so as to begin the harrowing, the weeding, the whatchmacallit with jembes or combine harvesters. We are definitely not being harangued by a factory foreman if we indeed are headed for the suburbs or the central business district. If we drive anywhere, the intervening hours between that drive and the drive back will be spent, hog-tied to a terminal, ears sutured to a landline, eye superglued to a Dell 15" screen, fingers furiously attempting to justify mobile-number-length bank balances.

The cars, engines having cooled down, cool as cucumbers, will slumber undisturbed (if you have underground or fenced-in parking) or will suffer the snot-nosed, grimy attentions of the glue-sniffing unemployed, quite possibly unemployable, ranks of the street families that supply much of our "parking assistants" these days. (Not the crutch-borne ones opposite the dead-as-a-dodo Kenya Cinema, though. Those ones are a class act.) Anyway, these four-wheeled phallic-replacements just sit there, not making money, taking up much needed perambulating real estate.

City centres are only attractive if they are relatively quiet, relatively smog-free (actually, a lot smog-free), pedestrian friendly and filled with massive numbers of benches where I can polish off the overpriced espresso or munch in utter confusion through another online lecture on the wonders of green-coloured edible Victoria's Secret's panties. What we have in the CBD, Westlands, Hurlingham, Yaya Centre, Eastleigh, Buru Buru, Baricho Road and South B - a rough area where pedestrians should be kings or queens or both - is the utter and wrongheaded domination of the automobile. No wonder we all look so harried when we finally make it back to our overpriced hovels. Being cooped up for hours on end, every day, in those tin cans can't be good, even if they bear three stars, four rings, blue-and-white propellers or leaping felines.

The main reason is that there are entirely too many buses on the roads, though a large number of them are not really buses - more like highly mobile modern day Caligula's palaces of orgiastic iniquities. And they behave in very odd ways. I think Kwame Owino needs to write a small monograph on this: why is a public service vehicle behaving like, to use a Ugandan phrase beloved of the slightly well-heeled - a special hire? Commuter buses should not operate like point-to-point taxi-cabs; they should be in constant motion, adjusting fares based on the all the variables that makes economic sense. 

When they take over Ronald Ngala Street between the Tom Mboya Street junction and Nyama Kima for all hours of the day, their engines idling all the while, they not only rob us of a peaceable business environment, they contribute a massive amount of impure air, narrow the space for the walking masses, and cost us billions every year in revenue, man-hours and motor insurance claims. Until we can make them true commuter vehicles, where they do not convert busy thoroughfares into termini, Nairobi will never be comfortable for the pedestrian or for the motorist.

I am not anti-car. I am pro-pedestrian.