Commuting in Accra

If you looked at the houses and the cars in the area that I live in, you might mistake it for Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. Although I am staying at a hostel, I am surrounded by foreign ambassadors, government officials and many of Ghana’s elites. The houses are multiple stories with large yards, surrounded by high fences and security guards at each entrance. There is a new development going up behind the US Embassy and I heard that each house is going to sell for at least $400,000. The builder is either from California or has borrowed the plans for most of the major developments going up in southern California as the houses have the distance Spanish tile roofs and cream-colored stuccoed walls.

Although I am definitely enjoying living in this extraordinarily safe neighborhood, I thought I would check out another place that one of my colleagues found near his house that has running water nearly all of the time. This afternoon around 4pm, Mordicai and I ventured out to see the potential new apartment. While it was only about 10 miles away from the office, I took us 2 hours to get there. I think I lost a few hours of life just from breathing in all of the exhaust.

Everyone commutes in this city, and most commutes take at least two hours to get to work in the morning and two hours to get back home. Generally, the roads consist of two lane roads with a small divider in the middle. The divider provides a platform for young people hocking bags of water, peanuts, soccer paraphernalia, fresh fruit and t-shirts. They walk amongst the cars who are sitting on the roads and wait outside the window for a moment to make sure you aren’t interested in their offerings. I never actually saw anyone buy anything, but I am assuming people get desperate for things like water and food in the hours they must sit there on the roads. In addition to the people, the roads contain a mix of cars, taxis and tro tros. Tro tros are buses about the size of a Volkswagen minibus that pack the people in like sardines before whisking them off to any number of destinations. They also pick people up on the road as they go along. I have heard that you could sit on one for a few hours waiting for it to fill up before it departs… and then they fill it up some more as it travels along.

We made it to the residence finally after driving on a very bumpy dirt road. I was definitely glad to be in an SUV. The Miata would never have made it. It was a very nice apartment complex. The building houses many of the university students, so I would clearly be the oldest one living there -- by far. I was told that in order to make it to work on time from there, I would have to leave by 6 or 6:30. “On time” means 8:30. So that is a two hour commute in a cab every morning. I hated to immediately reject the new place, but no water is certainly preferable to waking up at 5am only to drive two hours, breathe in fumes and listen to someone else’s music. There is a reason I left LA! I was told that everyone does it here though. They cannot afford to live in the middle of the city, so everyone has to commute several hours.

I was told that the city grew too quickly to set up any kind of formal public transportation system, and although politicians talk about it, nothing ever gets done… sounds familiar to my conversations about LA and its traffic issues. I am curious as to why the motorino market here never picked up like it has in many parts of Europe and Asia. The world’s cheapest car was released recently and I can’t even imagine what the impact will be on traffic in already congested areas of urban emerging markets. It doesn’t seem like what the world most needs is access to more cars.