Editorial Comment: Taming the traffic jungle demands a visionary plan

more vehicles are now on the road and public transport uses a lot of kombis rather than fewer but larger buses. More importantly the experience of the last couple of decades since the first one-way streets has identified problems not envisaged by the original planners.
The present one-way system has vastly improved north-south traffic flows in the east of the city centre, and no doubt the turning of Leopold Takawira and Chinhoyi Streets as a second pair of one-ways in the western half will help that side of the city centre.
East-west one ways have been a partial boon, and the conversion of South Avenue will help. But the advantages are only partial because of the limited access to the city centre from the east and west.
Enterprise Road South and Rotten Row provide wide modern highways on each side, and the road reserves allow both to be widened significantly to three lanes, or even four, in each direction.
Admittedly such widening will have to be accompanied by some intensive law enforcement over lane changing, but the fact remains, and will remain, that entering the city centre from its eastern and western routes is potentially easier than from its northern and, thanks to the railway, especially from its southern edges.
The resumption of implementation of the old plan will see just one bottleneck removed. Robert Mugabe Road will be one-way right through to Rotten Row, so it will become significantly easier to escape the city centre to the west although not easier to enter it from that side.
The council simply has to take more drastic action. For a start Nelson Mandela and Jason Moyo Avenues need to be driven through from Enterprise South to Rotten Row. This requires the council to follow through on its own plans and buy out a handful of properties on the western side so Nelson Mandela can link with Rotten Row.
At the same time some clever realignment and modest property purchases can be used to take Jason Moyo to Enterprise Road South. Driving through the ancient old polytech buildings, which the council actually owns, and then buying a strip of Raylton Club will create that corridor. Once traffic can get in and out of the city centre easier the full benefits of the one-way system within the city centre are realised.
Samora Machel Avenue is a disaster at rush hour, as everyone using it or trying to cross it in 5pm rain knows. There are two main bottlenecks.
In the west there is that sudden narrowing from three lanes in each direction to two between Takawira Street and Rotten Row, before a glorious widening to the west, and on the middle is that weird set of traffic lights around First Street, partly in response to a second-rate solution to provide access to the parkade entrances in Kwame Nkrumah Avenue.
Widening the western bottleneck is simple, and not very expensive.
The First Street horror needs more careful thought and perhaps even some modifications to the parkade so drivers living to the west of the city centre can enter and exit without causing massive pile-ups of traffic. If the only solution is turning right into one-way Sam Nujoma Street then that will be better than what we have now, so long, of course, as Nelson Mandela and Jason Moyo are one-way end to end across the city centre.
The other notorious bottleneck, that corner where Julius Nyerere exits to the south, needs drastic sorting out, which will have to include land-swops with the railways and probably a flyover.
The 1994 plan makes it easier to get around the city centre once you are in it. It does little, perhaps nothing, to make it easier to get in and out of the city centre. This is what also needs upgrading.
In fact it might be better to have a system whereby people going from the eastern edge to the western edge of the city centre drive around, rather than through, the area. That means, as we said so many times before, a southern link on the other side of the railway, or even a full realignment of the railway to remove the southern barrier to the city centre.
So while we appreciate the resumption of implementation of the 1994 plan, we also think there is time for a 2012 plan, too much has changed or become known to planners in the last two decades.
In particular the major weakness of improving traffic flows within the city centre, while doing little to improve the entrances and exits for that area, must be addressed with the same vigour as we now see on implementation of the older, and inadequate plan.