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ABSTRACT

Humankind throughout the world is providing new ways of dealing with complex challenges that

confront our world from time to time. In some cases ‘old strategies’ are lending support to ‘new

strategies’ to efficiently deal with the problems that we face on daily basis. Road traffic

congestion is one such problem that most cities in advanced and developing economies are

confronted with today. In order to manage this ‘devil’-traffic congestion-effectively and

efficiently an attempt has been made to investigate the prospects/ problems of using road pricing

to reduce traffic congestion in certain sections of the network in the city of Accra.

The Central Business District of Accra, the study area, has consistently witnessed significant

economic growth since the country’s attainment of independence. This area experiences the

greatest influx of people and vehicles on daily basis due to the great amounts of economic,

political, social and other forms of activities that take place there. Thus, the area is the place that

receives the greater share of traffic congestion in this country since most people go there to

transact business routinely on a daily basis. This phenomenon greatly reduces mobility of people

and decreases accessibility to vantage points within the Central Business District.

This trend is very significant in many ways. Road traffic congestion as we tried to demonstrate

throughout the entire study is caused by a myriad of factors- human and non-human factors (such

as income, engineering nature of the roads, state of the roads etc.). As the wealth of a nation

increases, so it is with individuals (all things being equal). Employing both qualitative and

quantitative methods, this investigation came out with some interesting revelations. One of the

principal findings is the revelation of a very strong positive correlation (0.82) between income

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and vehicle ownership amongst private vehicle owners/drivers in the city of Accra within the

study area. Most literatures are of the view that such a relationship has ramifications on traffic

congestion in most cities, and Accra is no exception as the research has shown.

This work has also demonstrated that, there is a very strong will on the part of a cross section of

the citizenry to join forces with the authorities to jointly apply road pricing (should the need be)

to solve the problem of traffic congestion in the CBD of Accra. It also became clear that when

one decides to introduce road pricing as a mechanism to reduce congestion on certain arteries in

the CBD, certain things such as the use to which the revenue generated would be put should be

made perfectly clear to the public since this is a major factor that influences acceptance or

rejection of such an exercise.