Last night I spent two hours in traffic, and that wasn’t to move from the CBD to my place in Kasarani, but from Archives to the Ring Road/Thika Road interchange, a stretch of barely three kilometres. If you live in Nairobi, you don’t need me to tell you this is normal. The city has reached a point where three kilometres can feel longer than the distance to Naivasha. The reason isn’t hard to spot. River Road, Tom Mboya Street, Moi Avenue, they are no longer streets, but hijacked bus termini that have throttled traffic flow, turned pavements into passenger waiting bays, and converted every inch of Nairobi’s CBD into one chaotic parking lot. Instead of moving people and goods, the city centre has become one giant bus station.
The result is measurable, not just anecdotal. According to Business Insider Africa, Nairobi has the second-worst traffic in Africa, with a congestion index of 249 and average delays of close to an hour per trip. The Star Newspaper estimates that jams drain Ksh120 billion from the economy every year. That is fuel burned, hours lost, deals missed, tempers stretched. And according to TomTom’s global traffic index, Nairobians lose nearly 94 hours of their lives every year simply sitting in gridlock, as average evening speeds crawl to 17 kilometres per hour.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Cities around the world that once choked on their own congestion discovered a simple truth: streets must remain streets. Termini must be termini. The way out is to move the chaos off the surface and back into structure.
London, for example, invested in underground and off-street termini decades ago, linked to its Tube and bus networks. Singapore made it impossible for buses to randomly pick passengers along Orchard Road or Marina Bay. Even closer home, Addis Ababa has invested in light rail and designated bus terminals that feed directly into it. The logic is the same: order the public transport system and the city breathes again.
Imagine Nairobi with four massive underground bus stations. One serving Thika Road, another Jogoo Road, another Ngong Road and another Mombasa Road. Buses and matatus would descend into properly designed bays with waiting lounges and exits feeding into different corners of the CBD. Above ground, River Road and Moi Avenue would breathe again, actual streets, not glorified parking yards.
The cost of such a transformation is steep. International projects show that a single underground terminus with 30–40 bays costs between USD 100 and 250 million. Multiply that by four and Nairobi would need to spend about USD 1 billion, roughly Ksh125 billion. That is nearly twice the price tag of the Nairobi Expressway and close to the entire national health budget for 2024/25.
But when you weigh that against the Ksh120 billion the city already bleeds every year, the math is less intimidating. Nairobians are already paying the price, only in wasted fuel, wasted hours, and wasted lives.
Still, the problem is not only the matatus. The elephant in the room remains private cars. A non-scientific count I once did along Ngong Road showed that for every PSV entering the CBD, there were between 9 and 15 private cars. Let’s call it 10 for every one matatu or bus. If Nairobi has around 30,000 PSVs, then we are looking at 300,000 personal vehicles squeezing into the CBD daily. Which do you think does more damage to traffic flow?
And yet, policy consistently avoids confronting this truth. Why? Because every one of those 300,000 cars pays Ksh300 in parking fees. That is nearly Ksh90 million daily, or more than Ksh2 billion annually, a revenue stream no county government is eager to disrupt. So while we chase matatus off the streets in the name of order, the real culprit, the personal car, remains untouchable.
Cities that have succeeded in taming congestion didn’t shy away from such hard decisions. Stockholm introduced congestion taxes that reduced the number of cars entering the city by nearly 20 percent. London’s congestion charge transformed how people approached the city centre. Even in developing contexts like Dar es Salaam, the rollout of a proper Bus Rapid Transit system has started shifting commuters out of private cars. Nairobi, however, clings to the illusion that everyone can drive into the CBD and still expect free-flowing roads.
That is why underground termini would only be half the solution. The other half must be a bold policy shift to control private car access to the city. Imagine parking fees of Ksh3,000 per day, or tolling charges for every entry into the CBD. Harsh? Yes. Effective? Definitely. Couple that with a modern, reliable public transport system, and suddenly the car loses its stranglehold on Nairobi’s arteries.
Of course, critics will argue that Nairobi lacks enough PSVs to replace private cars. But this scarcity is a myth created by congestion itself. If traffic actually flowed, 4,000 well-managed high-capacity buses could move most of Nairobi’s commuters comfortably. It is the standstill that makes it appear we need tens of thousands of matatus crawling everywhere.
The larger tragedy is that traffic in Nairobi is treated as an unavoidable fact of life. We complain, we adapt, we pad our schedules with an extra hour here and there. Yet in doing so we lose billions as a nation, and hours of life as individuals. Cities that take themselves seriously do not tolerate this. They fix it.
So perhaps the real question isn’t whether Nairobi can afford to build underground bus stations. It is whether Nairobi can still afford not to.
