Nairobi traffic,
road by road.

Patterns tell you what usually happens. They cannot tell you about the lorry that jackknifed at Cabanas twenty minutes ago.

That part comes from other drivers. In the Rada app you save the roads you actually use, and you get a notification the moment someone reports an accident, a closure, roadwork or a hazard on one of them. Before you leave the house, rather than once you are already sitting in it.

Everything points at the CBD

Nairobi's main roads are spokes on a wheel. Thika Road, Mombasa Road, Waiyaki Way, Jogoo Road, Ngong Road and Langata Road all run in from the suburbs and the satellite towns towards the same small city centre, and every one of them loses lanes as it gets close.

That is why the morning peak is so lopsided. Almost all of it is inbound, towards the CBD, as hundreds of thousands of people from Kasarani, Embakasi, Rongai, Ruiru, Syokimau and Kikuyu head for the same few square kilometres between 6:30 and 9:00. In the evening the whole thing runs in reverse and the pressure moves outbound.

Two things follow from that. If your day allows it, travelling against the flow is the cheapest trick available, because the opposite carriageway is often close to empty at the exact hour your side is stationary. And if you are not actually going to town, the bypasses exist precisely so you do not have to: Eastern, Southern and Northern let you cross from one spoke to another without touching the middle.

Matatus move Nairobi, and they also stop it

Matatus carry the majority of this city's commuters. A fourteen-seater or a bus moves far more people than the private cars around it, and without them these roads would be carrying more vehicles, not fewer. But the way the industry operates is also the single biggest cause of the stop-start congestion in both peaks.

A matatu earns per passenger rather than per trip, so it stops wherever passengers are, which is frequently not a designated stage. Drop-off points at places like Roysambu, Cabanas, Githurai and the CBD approaches get clogged with vehicles waiting to fill up before moving. Overlapping, where vehicles pull onto the shoulder, the service lane or the wrong side of the road to jump the queue, then turns one blocked lane into two or three and leaves nothing for anyone coming the other way.

For planning your own trip, this means jams on these roads build at stages and junctions rather than spreading evenly along a stretch, they form fastest in the two peaks when competition for passengers is hardest, and a queue that looks hopeless can clear in a few minutes once the vehicles at the front load and pull away.

When it rains, the map changes

Rain overrides every pattern on this site. Add thirty to sixty minutes to any journey, and expect the drainage to give way in the same places it always does. Underpasses flood first. Several of the low-lying entry points into the CBD go next, and a handful of roads stop being slow and simply become impassable for an hour or two. Anything unpaved, or dug up for works, turns to mud.

This matters more than usual right now. Forecasters have flagged an El Niño-influenced rainy season over the coming months, which points to heavier and more frequent downpours than a normal season. A flooded underpass is exactly the kind of thing no official notice reaches you about in time. It gets reported by the driver who is already looking at it.

These pages are written guides, updated by hand. Live incidents are in the app, because that is where the drivers reporting them are.