Nairobi Flow

It took some concerted thought to figure out what makes driving in Nairobi so unique. A city notorious for its traffic jams, but jams that tend to slowly flow where in other cities the cars, buses, and trucks would be sitting still.

Rule #1: If there is space for the vehicle, in the direction the vehicle wants to go, then the driver can drive into that space. This supersedes any lines drawn on the road, any edges to the road, or anything else that in other countries would make a driver wait behind the vehicle in front.

Rule #2: Rule #1 applies just as much to me as to the vehicle to my left or right who needs to cross in front of my vehicle to get where it is going. So rather than road rage for being “cut off”, we all just slowly move toward our destination and all vehicles keep flowing.

That’s it. That’s a unique set of rules I’ve not seen elsewhere. And it works.

I couldn’t find a diagram of Nairobi’s unwritten rules but this AI-generated diagram comes from the Kenya highway authority. Yes, they do have highways in Nairobi.

The standard intersection in Mauritius is the roundabout, and there the rules are like elsewhere in the world: the vehicles entering the roundabout yield to those already in the roundabout. That leads to kilometer-long traffic jams on the highways from cars waiting their turn to exit through the roundabout round at the end of most exits.

The standard intersection in Cape Town is the traffic light, and like other “developed” cities, at rush hour only a few cars at a time can make it through an intersection, with just one or two whose goal is to turn across the oncoming traffic.

Nairobi has very few traffic lights, many traffic circles, and tons of intersections with no controls at all. The rush hour traffic is often slow, and there are still the occasional mid-day jams too, but except at the major intersections where the traffic police stop lanes, the traffic manages a slow and steady flow even as cars, buses, trucks, and motorcycles cross and turn through roundabouts and other intersections.

It’s a cooperative dance between drivers.

I did see one piece of that cooperation in Mauritius. Traffic or not, Mauritian drivers (with rare exceptions) always cleanly zipper merge when two lanes become one. It doesn’t matter if one road is clearly the arterial and the other a minor road. Drivers each let one vehicle merge in front. If only they did this at roundabouts too, the traffic on the island would be lessened.

Nairobi driving is just one step more cooperative, with all the drivers taking turns moving forward, which instead of causing gridlock causes a “Nairobi flow”.

I doubt that works if at the same time you keep to the lanes drawn in paint on the roads, but as my first-ever African taxi driver explained when I came to Nairobi ten years ago, those are just for decoration.

A Year Abroad