MOTION - ENHANCING HIGHWAY SAFETY AND CONVENIENCE THAT, AWARE THAT the majority of highwa…

Motion text

MOTION - ENHANCING HIGHWAY SAFETY AND CONVENIENCE THAT, AWARE THAT the majority of highway users, most of whom are long distance travelers and some of whom are children, elderly, and sick, face a myriad of challenges including traffic delays and breakdown of their vehicles that cause them to spend long hours on the road exposing them to starvation, insecurity threats, and to the need for sanitary and medical facilities; FURTHER AWARE THAT setting up safe stopping points for road users at regular intervals with the necessary road-side amenities such as fuel stations, parking spaces, restaurants, telephone booths, minor repair shops, medical facilities, and toilets enhances total travel experience and the lack of these points make it impractical for drivers to stop as often as they would wish to resulting into driving-related fatigue, a significant contributor to accidents on the highways; COGNIZANT THAT the current road-side amenities operated and maintained by private companies, majorly oil companies, are located in urban centers while in the countryside there are inadequate numbers offering limited variety of facilities; ACKNOWLEDGING THAT the cost of such developments and the uncertainty of the returns on investment restrict the supply of the facilities, the risks too great for small companies and the returns too meagre for large companies, some amenities remain unviable, and insufficiently provided for by commercial companies necessitating government intervention; FURTHER COGNIZANT THAT governments across the world such as France and Germany have taken on the task of setting up such amenities through incorporation of the basic provisions in their road transport infrastructure through different models of Public Private Partnership (PPP), lease, or ownership; NOW THEREFORE the Senate resolves that the Ministries of Roads, Transport and Public Works, Health, the Kenya National Highways Authority, and the National Transport and Safety Authority to come up with a policy framework to include: - i) the incorporation of road reserves for road-side amenities in all highway designs; ii) undertaking a survey to ascertain the specific amenities required but not available on the existing highways and the most convenient locations to develop them; and iii) development of a Public Private Partnership guideline on leasing of the road reserves to developers, financing the construction of the amenities, and the packaging of incentives to attract investors.