Is oligopoly behind city transport woes?

Editor, RE: “Public transport woes continue to dog City of Kigali” (The New Times, August 4). Could this problem perhaps be partly due to the oligopoly effect? Three bus companies were exclusively granted the rights to ply the major city routes. Without competition, what incentive do the companies have to go out of their way to serve their customers? Of course, there is always the looming threat of losing their licenses, but at this point these companies own fleets that the City would be hard pressed to find companies capable of availing at short notice. Why else, in an article on the woes of the passengers, would an operator proudly point out that he has already met the bare minimum of 96 buses and gone over and above by 10? There is an obvious problem; the number of buses is not enough to cover peak hour traffic. This is not an issue that will be resolved in a day or two and the economics of purchasing more buses may not be favourable for the operators, (this we can understand), but they should not insult our collective intelligence with the claim that there are enough buses. Commuter *************************** I commend RURA a job well done in regulating the transport sector. However in this case, I believe it was a case of over regulation which actually granted monopoly to the owners instead of serving the bigger public good.For example, the route Gishushu-Nyarutarama is not served by adequate buses yet this is the route with a very large number of people that you find walking in the morning. What part of regulation prevented private operators using this route…leading the three companies to only allocate the most profitable routes? However, RURA is now faced with a veritable quagmire, because it was a five-year transport deal that has three more years to go. There are various options, but I must also fault the five-year deal. This was too long a period; it should have been two years, renewable upon satisfaction/monitoring of events.Over to RURA to do the needful! Kigali Girl **************************** I would think the people actually being ‘dogged’ are the commuters, not the city planners. Hapless city-dwellers themselves, dogged out of their wits by never-ending transport woes, need in their turn to put more pressure on city planners and to push them to improve our transport infrastructure and public transport services. That these services might be better and cleaner than those in Kampala or other EAC capitals does not say much when we all know how dilapidated those are now, a far cry from what they used to be during the heyday of the Uganda Transport Company (UTC) up to the Mugoya management period in the early 1970s, or the Kenya Bus Service (KBS) till the mid-1980s. Mwene Kalinda

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Is oligopoly behind city transport woes?