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Inaction on air pollution, ecological ruin homicidal: UNEP chief

For example, despite making progress in the area of low sulphur fuel, Steiner has called out the Kenyan government and previous administrations for focusing resources on, “roads for the rich,” as opposed to a, “mass transit system for the majority.”

Wider roads, he argues, are a short-sighted solution to the traffic problem as the number of cars in the country double on average every seven to eight years.

“It is actually one of the ironies that Africa’s mobility is very much premised on public transport today but the proportion of people who are travelling through public transport is declining while private mobility is increasingly becoming a more prominent feature.

“If you spend all your money on building more roads, widening roads, speaks to an equity issue. The mass of the working population either has to walk on a mud track next to the paved million dollar road because there’s no pavement to allow people to walk safely or cycling lane so cycling to work is a life-threatening risk and above all they don’t have comfortable public transport. Thika Highway is an example of where we invest in serving a minority.”

All the big cities, he says, have rapid transit systems in place.

The emergence of ‘boda bodas’ (motorcycle taxis), he adds, is proof that there is a need among the majority of Kenyans, who fall in the lower income brackets, for reliable means of transportation.

And just as Kenyans “leapfrogged” past that land-line thanks to the mobile phone, Steiner argues that there’s no reason Kenya has to follow in the footsteps of the developed world by fostering a reliance on fossil fuels and should jump straight ahead to a clean energy future given the cost, outlined above, of air pollution.

“I have often felt that it is one of the great myths of the twentieth Century that Africa always has to follow a generation later on technology. The boda boda revolution we’re seeing is attributable to the price of motorcycles coming down significantly but what stops governments in Africa from saying we should have electric motorcycles in urban areas because in China, Indonesia electric motorcycles are being sold in their millions at the same cost as a normal two-stroke engine.”

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