Africa-Press – Tanzania. CHAOS is now being witnessed every day on service roads along Nelson Mandela Expressway with law enforcement entities, including the Tanzania National Roads Agency (TANROADS) appearing not to take any concrete steps to rectify the situation.
An observation conducted by this newspaper for the past four months has witnessed what one can term it as total mess on the service roads along the Dar es Salaam Port Access Road, leaving many questions unanswered just in case an accident occurs on the road, requiring motorists to look for an alternative way to escape.
Service road is relatively narrow road running parallel to a main road and providing access to houses, shops, offices, factories, etc, situated along its length.
A service road serves as an escape route for motorists should anything bad such as accident block traffic on the major road.
In the past Tanroads regularly carried out road patrols for the major purpose of overseeing and enforcing traffic safety compliance on roads and highways, including protecting service roads from being misused.
It was strictly prohibited for any individual to carry out any activity on service roads. Whenever Tanroads carried out such highway patrols, we witnessed car owners being penalised for parking their vehicles on the areas. Buguruni- Tabata Matumbi area along Nelson Mandela road area has now proved to be notorious for this problem. Truck drivers have now turned this area into their parking site, completely blocking it.
Given the fact that truck drivers have been scrambling for the parking site on the service road in this area the malpractice has now become one of the reasons causing unnecessary traffic jams on Buruguni- Tabata Matumbi stretch along the highway.
We don’t want to believe authorities, including Tanroads have failed to bring sanity in this area to smoothen traffic flow along this road which is the backbone of the countries economically.
This mess must be cleared before the situation gets out of hand. It is possible, what is required is just firmness and determination.
