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Accident and road closure
alerts in Nairobi.

Official notices cover the closures somebody planned. Almost nothing covers the lorry that jackknifed twenty minutes ago on the road you are about to join. Here is who announces what, and how to hear about the rest sooner.

Who announces what

Responsibility for Nairobi's roads is split, which is the first reason information is hard to find in one place.

  • KeNHA covers the national trunk roads: Thika Road, Mombasa Road, Waiyaki Way and the other A-numbered routes. Planned works and diversions on those usually appear a day or two ahead.
  • KURA and Nairobi County cover the urban roads: Ngong Road, Jogoo Road, Outer Ring, Langata Road and the city streets.
  • The Expressway operator handles the elevated toll road separately. An incident up there does not mean Mombasa Road below is affected, and the reverse is equally true.
  • NTSA and the traffic police report incidents and diversions as they happen.
  • The airport authority covers anything affecting the terminal approaches.

All of them are worth following. None of them is a complete picture on its own, and between them they still leave the biggest gap wide open.

Why official alerts reach you late

It is not incompetence. It is what these channels are for. They announce the planned, not the sudden. A notice about resurfacing next Tuesday can be written on Friday. A notice about a crash that happened four minutes ago has to be seen, verified, written and published by an organisation that was not there.

By the time that chain completes, one of two things has happened. Either the incident has cleared and the notice is now wrong, or you have already joined the back of the queue and the notice is now useless. The information you needed existed the whole time. It was just sitting in the heads of the fifty drivers at the front.

Radio bulletins partly close this, and they remain genuinely useful, but they run on a schedule and they cover the city rather than your road.

If you come across a crash

  • Do not stop in a live lane. The single biggest cause of a second crash is the queue that formed for the first one. Pull well clear of the carriageway or keep moving.
  • Call for help before anything else. Kenya's emergency numbers are 999 and 112, both free from a mobile.
  • Warn the traffic behind you if you can do it safely. Hazard lights on the approach do more for the people behind you than anything else available to you.
  • Do not crowd the scene. Recovery vehicles and ambulances have to reach it through the same traffic everyone else is in.
  • Report it once you are stopped and safe so drivers still approaching can choose another road. Never do this while the car is moving.

Getting alerted about your own route

Following every authority above gives you the whole city, most of which is not your problem, and none of it in the first twenty minutes when it would have changed your decision.

Rada inverts that. You save the roads you actually drive, and you get a notification only when something is reported on one of them. Other drivers then keep the report updated as the situation changes: cleared, still bad, getting worse, traffic moving. Reports cover accidents, breakdowns and hazards, road closures, roadworks, congestion and roadside activity.

It is not a replacement for the official channels, and it is not a substitute for emergency services. It is the twenty minutes before either of them reaches you.

Quick answers

For planned closures, check KeNHA for the national trunk roads and KURA or Nairobi County for the urban ones. For a closure that has just happened, no official channel is likely to be fast enough, which is where reports from drivers already on the road are the only timely source.
999 and 112 both reach emergency services and are free from a mobile phone. Call before doing anything else at a crash scene, and do not stop in a live lane to make the call.
In Rada, report it from the app once you are stopped and safe, pinning it at the place you saw it. Never report while driving. If you have a passenger, let them do it. The report then reaches drivers who have saved that road and are still approaching it.
Yes, that is what Rada is built around. You save the roads you drive rather than entering a destination each time, and you are notified only about incidents on those roads instead of everything happening across the city.
A Rada report reaches everyone who has saved that road as soon as it is submitted. The limit is how quickly somebody at the scene reports it, which is why the size of the reporting community matters more than anything else.

Be told about your road, not the whole city

Save the roads you drive in Rada and get an alert when another driver reports an accident, a closure, roadwork or a hazard on one of them. Free to start.

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