Truck Parking Requirements: the Case of Athi River Weighbridge Located Along Mombasa Nairobi Highway

Abstract

Truck parking facilities are an important element in Kenya’s transportation system, the shortage of which can lead to high economic costs and national safety concerns. This study seeks to determine operational, design and management challenges at the Athi River Weighbridge Station, in relation to the supply and demand dynamics of truck parking. It reviewed factors that influenced the location of the weigh station and identified the design considerations that informed the establishment of the weighbridge. This included an estimation of parking demand due to weighbridge operations, by use of a modelling approach that considered daily volume of trucks traveling across the segment, and the duration of stops anticipated both in the short-term and long-term. Field observations were also used to develop and calibrate the model. The results revealed that the Athi River Weighbridge operations contributed to only 19% of the aggregate parking demand, with 65.8% of this being less than thirty minutes’ duration, and the rest ranging between thirty minutes and a one-hour duration. Further, most of the trucks that were parked for less than thirty minutes or between thirty minutes and an hour, was primarily due to queuing into the weighbridge. The study finds that the Nairobi Expressway from Mlolongo – JKIA – James Gichuru, the first “Real Toll Road” in Kenya (where the CAPEX is solely funded by the private sector and the cash flow generated from tolling and other operation revenues), could have taken advantage of developing the parking facility to enhance the revenue over the concession period and reduce the payback period. This study recommends that analytical tools, such as the multi linear regression analysis be used to model current and future demand for truck parking facilities in all weigh bridge locations.