Even rail lines we don’t have capacity, how much more sky train? – Expert quizzes

A Transport Expert, Rev Dr. Charles Adam, lamented Ghana’s lack of capacity to build and maintain transport systems.

According to him, the fundamental problem is that the country does not have the required systems in place to build and manage sky trains when it has constantly failed to manage the railway systems.

Conversations over Ghana’s sky train became topical in recent times after the Minority in parliament launched some probes into the US$2 million Sky train project.

“What we need is a workable transport master plan for the urban area of Accra. We tried to do that when we wanted to do the Bus Rapid System (BRS) but everything we planned we couldn’t do it. So, we probably have to go back to the drawing table and find out, why we couldn’t do it,” he was quoted by 3news.com.

According to Rev Adam, Ghana has refused to learn the right approach to enhancing these new technologies in order to successfully launch them.

He added that until the country is able to work on its railway system, a higher infrastructure will be difficult to implement.

“Why is it that Nigeria built its bus rapid system, and now it is building a rail network? It is because it has learned how to do it right. We haven’t even learned to build the first one and we are thinking of jumping to a higher infrastructure or a higher system that probably may be a little more complicated. We don’t have any public transport authority, even the institutional capacity does not exist, and the capacity to maintain a rail network today doesn’t exist, what we know about rail networks is based on old technology.

“We have built a lot of rail lines but we don’t have trains running. So if you ask me whether we have the capacity to even maintain rail service, I doubt it and that is the kind of problem that Ethiopia is also facing, they built nice beautiful systems because it was promised and was delivered but they don’t have the capacity to maintain it,” he said.

SSD/NOQ

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