Bezawit waits at the zebra crossing near Ayat, the green walk signal glowing above her. She steps forward, head high, walking fast. A Toyota swerves through the turn, missing her by less than a meter. She flinches, but keeps moving. “Almost always, I feel in danger,” the civil engineer says. “I double check before I cross and walk quickly, but it doesn’t matter—they turn so close you can feel the heat of the engine.”

Elsewhere, on Haile Gebreselassie Road, a middle-aged man vaults the concrete divider, weaving between cars. He’s on the phone, eyes fixed ahead, barely glancing at the vehicles braking around him. Drivers lean on their horns, but the lane barely clears before a minibus stops dead to scoop up two passengers. The queue of cars behind it stretches past the next intersection.

At Piassa, a shiny SUV blocks half of a moving lane while the owner enjoys a coffee inside a nearby café. Traffic bunches, drivers fume, and the street slowly congeals to a standstill.

This is daily life on Addis Ababa’s roads: a theater of close calls, frayed tempers, and improvised survival. The city moves, but always at the brink of paralysis.

It is easy to blame the sheer number of vehicles or the lack of infrastructure. But the deeper story is more troubling—how cultural norms, broken institutions, and unearned privilege have turned our roads into a commons that is relentlessly abused. The result is not just congestion; it is a system where danger and disorder are normal, where both drivers and pedestrians assume that the rules will not protect them.

This article is the first of a two-part series. In Part 1, we trace the roots of the city’s traffic tragedy—how individual actions, institutional decay, and physical bottlenecks collide to create the crisis we live every day. These same forces will undermine even the most ambitious road expansion and beautification projects, turning new lanes into wider stages for the same collisions, the same lawlessness, and the same distrust. Part 2 will look at what it takes to break that cycle—not with more asphalt, but with the rules, incentives, and public trust that make any road network safe and functional.

The Human Cost

In Addis Ababa, travel isn’t just about getting from one place to another—it’s about survival. On foot, a pedestrian scans for gaps in traffic the way soldiers scan for enemy fire—constantly alert, heart pounding. Behind the wheel, the drivers’ eyes work overtime—road ahead, side mirrors, rearview—anticipating the sudden lurch of a minibus or the hesitation of a driver who’s never truly learned the rules.

The numbers bear out the danger. In 2022–2023, 86 percent of traffic fatalities in Addis Ababa were pedestrians, underscoring how perilously exposed they are. Of 8,458 crashes police documented over a three-year period, 1,274 were fatal and 7,184 caused injury. Such incidents have moved from exception to expectation. These numbers are not accidents, they are symptoms of a deeper pathology: the chasm between what Addis knows about road use and how it behaves.

Traffic in Addis does more than threaten lives—it wears them down. Studies from other cities trace a direct link between congestion-related commuting delays and increased depression risk—by 0.8 percent per ten minutes of delay—and show that transit users face lower rates of depression compared to solo drivers. Meanwhile, global health research ties traffic noise exposure—a constant in dense Addis neighborhoods—to elevated anxiety and depression risk, approximately nine percent higher per 10dB (decibel) increase. Addis Ababa consistently exceeds the World Health Organization (WHO) daytime noise guideline of 55 dB for residential areas. Though comprehensive citywide noise mapping is lacking, studies in comparable Ethiopian cities like Dessie found that 83 percent of mixed-use areas and 86 percent of commercial areas recorded 66–72 dB during peak hours (8–11 AM and 4–7 PM). This staggering figure underscores the direct consequence of a system failing its most vulnerable users. Given Addis Ababa’s larger size and heavier traffic, similar or higher levels are likely. In overcrowded corridors, the constant blare of horns and breakdowns wears at the psyche. Intersection delays alone add up to over 12,700 daily vehicle-minutes, amplifying idling-related noise.

If the constant din of traffic frays the nerves, the air it generates undermines the lungs. Addis Ababa’s air quality regularly exceeds global health limits, with fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) levels far above the World Health Organization’s 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³. In early August 2025, the city recorded a PM₂.₅ concentration of about 54 µg/m³ (AQI 147), nearly four times the limit, placing it in the “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” range. Continuous monitoring shows daily means typically in the 40–50 µg/m³ range, and annual averages—27.0 µg/m³ in 2023, 31.3 µg/m³ in 2022—are five to six times the WHO’s updated annual guideline. Coarse particles (PM₁₀) are also elevated, averaging around 70–76 µg/m³, far exceeding the 15 µg/m³ annual benchmark. On some days, Addis ranks among the ten most polluted major cities in the world; in Africa, it consistently sits near the top, rivaling Kigali and Kampala while far surpassing Nairobi or Cape Town.

The sources are no mystery. Vehicle exhaust is the single largest contributor (~29 percent), with old diesel trucks, buses, and minibuses—often over 20 years old—emitting heavy soot and fumes. Biomass burning for cooking and heating fills residential neighborhoods with smoke, especially in the cooler months. Dust from unpaved roads, construction sites, and deforested slopes combines with smoke from open waste burning—including seasonal traditions such as “Hidar Sitaten”—to create recurring pollution spikes. Industrial zones like Akaki Kality add their own plume of particulates from factories lacking modern emission controls. Geography and weather compound the problem: Addis’s high elevation and surrounding hills encourage temperature inversions that trap pollutants close to the ground, while dry-season winds and lack of rainfall allow dust and soot to linger. The result is an urban atmosphere where daily life is lived in a haze—an invisible tax on health, productivity, and quality of life.

The Core Delusion: Knowing vs. Behaving

These physical factors, however, only compound a crisis fundamentally rooted in behavior and governance. Addis Ababa’s traffic crisis extends beyond infrastructure or enforcement—it’s fundamentally a crisis of mindset. While residents universally acknowledge driving as a privilege bound by rules, their behavior reveals a stark contradiction: they act as though road access were an untouchable right. Pedestrians, drivers, and transport operators alike treat public space as personal territory, dismissing their obligations to others.

This cognitive dissonance quietly corrodes civic order. Theoretically, people accept that privileges can be regulated or revoked; in practice, they resist restrictions as infringements on their imagined “right” to the road. The chasm between principle and action transforms streets into a textbook example of what Garrett Hardin called the Tragedy of the Commons: Hardin’s “commons” die when users prioritize self-interest over collective survival—precisely what unfolds daily on any street in Addis Ababa.

The consequences are everywhere, carved into the daily commute. Illegal parking seize the city’s arteries. A two-lane road loses half its capacity to “temporary” stops; add a row of double-parkers and the trickle that remains is barely wide enough for a motorcycle to squeeze through. Each theft is rationalized—“just for a minute,” “I’m waiting for someone”—but multiplied across hundreds of vehicles, the cumulative robbery lasts all day.

Empty seats plague crowded corridors. At rush hour, arterial roads pulse with single-occupancy cars—five seats occupied by one person, monopolizing the same road space as a bus or minibus carrying twenty. This is not mobility; it is the hoarding of a scarce public resource under the banner of personal freedom. When it becomes the norm, the freedom of each driver is bought at the cost of immobility for the city.

School drop-offs weaponize good intentions. Twice a day, parents queue across bike lanes, crosswalks, and intersections, convinced they are protecting children. In reality, they are manufacturing the very danger they fear—forcing cyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers into conflict zones. What should be a quick hand-off becomes a rolling blockade, one that ripples backward for blocks.

Then there is minibus taxi mayhem, the shattering of whatever residual order the roads still hold. Minibuses should relieve congestion; instead, they often intensify it. Drivers stop wherever a hand goes up—inside intersections, on narrow bridges, over zebra crossings—because missing a fare means missing the day’s earnings. In a system that neither rewards discipline nor punishes chaos, even the best-intentioned drivers are pulled toward predatory habits.

Nowhere is the breakdown more visible than along the light rail. At these stations, pedestrians bunch at curb edges like wildebeests at the Mara River—hesitant, surging, then sprinting across oncoming traffic. The comparison is instructive: the wildebeests face crocodiles; our “crocodiles” are human choices—drivers running reds, vehicles encroaching on crosswalks, pedestrians darting at random. Their danger is natural; ours is engineered—and preventable.

Enforcement and Licensing: Law as a Transaction

Beneath it all is the farce of licensing. A driver’s license should certify competence. In Addis Ababa, it too often certifies only a transaction. Driving schools rush theory, neglect practice, and bribes bypass the road test entirely. The results are visible in daily traffic: lane changes without signaling, panic at roundabouts, indecision mixed with aggression in even mild congestion, and crosswalks treated as ornamental. You cannot enforce lane discipline when many drivers have never been taught what the lane lines mean—or when there are no lane lines to follow.

Even the thin line of enforcement is frayed. Traffic police stand at major intersections, but their presence rarely changes the fundamentals. The sheer volume of vehicles overwhelms their ability to keep order; their numbers are too few for the scale of the chaos. When they do enforce the rules, the act of pulling over a car during rush hour often worsens the jam they are trying to fix. Most are on foot, with little equipment or training to manage real-time flow or pursue offenders. At times they override functioning traffic lights, creating uncertainty and teaching road users that signals are optional.

In recent years, the city has expanded its enforcement apparatus. A dedicated Traffic Management Agency was created, and a World Bank–backed program worth over USD 80 million increased the number of traffic police. But more bodies in uniform have not solved the deeper problem. Local reporting and international assessments still document widespread solicitation of bribes—often over minor infractions. Officers lack the authority to enforce the law against military and government vehicles that routinely violate traffic rules—the very actors who should set the standard. Too often, they focus on small technicalities, not to improve safety but to extract payment. Underpaid and exhausted, they remain easy targets for corruption, turning enforcement into negotiation rather than deterrence.

This culture of negotiation corrodes trust. Drivers learn to treat the law as a fee-based service, not a binding standard. It also undermines deterrence: if a fine is simply an informal payment, there is no lasting incentive to change behavior. The licensing process feeds this cycle, producing undertrained drivers who enter a system where rules are conditional and penalties negotiable.

The institutional weaknesses show their cost most clearly when vehicles stall or collide. Aging cars and poor maintenance guarantee frequent breakdowns, but in a city where lanes are already stolen by illegal parking and narrowed by U-turns, one stopped vehicle can freeze entire corridors. Accidents paralyze districts for hours as drivers await police scene measurements, while crowds spill into the roadway, turning minutes into gridlock. The result is measurable: at key intersections, congestion already generates over 12,700 vehicle-minutes of delay daily—equivalent to more than 212 hours of lost movement before accounting for the added delays from breakdowns and collisions. In a well-governed system, most of these events would be cleared in minutes. In Addis, they become spectacles—part theatre, part standstill—magnifying disruption tenfold.

The Expansion Trap

When privilege on the roads goes unchecked, it doesn’t just clog today’s traffic—it shapes tomorrow’s solutions. The worse the gridlock, the more irresistible the call becomes: build more roads, widen the lanes, pour more concrete.

No one doubts expansive, well-maintained roads are essential to growth, linking markets, lowering transport costs, and opening access to jobs. But asphalt alone cannot cure gridlock. Addis Ababa’s own record proves it. The Addis Corridor Project widened arterials, added flyovers, resurfaced miles of pavement. Congestion barely budged. The same habits—lane theft, random stops, uncontrolled U-turns—simply spread into the new space.

This is ‘induced demand’—a well-documented phenomenon where new road capacity attracts more trips, filling the space and restoring congestion. Without enforcement, training, and disciplined public transport, new roads become expensive holding pens for the same chaos. The city ends up with wider standstills, not faster travel. Infrastructure is necessary—but without rules that bite and systems that work, it simply magnifies the dysfunction.

The costs of chaos

The price of this chaos extends far beyond daily frustration—it is measured in lives, time, and billions of dollars. Thousands of Ethiopians die on the roads each year, with Addis accounting for a heavy share. Even valuing a statistical life conservatively, the fatalities alone represent losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually—before counting long-term disability and the economic aftershocks for families.

The gridlock also bleeds productivity. Using Addis Ababa’s economic output (≈ USD 61 billion) as a baseline, and applying a conservative congestion loss of 2–4 percent—figures in line with major African cities—the city forfeits USD 1.2–2.4 billion every year in time commuters and freight will never recover. The health costs pile on: stop-and-go traffic and vehicle emissions pump fine particulates and noxious gases into the air, shortening lives and straining hospitals. Premature deaths, illness, and lost work tied to urban air pollution add at least low-hundreds of millions more.

Inequality deepens the toll. Poorer residents, living farther from job centers and reliant on slower, less reliable transport, bear a heavier commuting burden. With roughly 16.8 percent of Addis’s population in poverty, even modest assumptions—an annual household income of USD 1,320 and a 30 percent higher commuting cost—yield an extra USD 332 million lost each year to wasted time and money.

Then there is the uniquely Addis tax on motion: collisions that paralyze entire corridors. Damaged vehicles are left in place until police arrive to measure the scene, while crowds spill into the roadway. Even without crashes, intersection delays at surveyed sites total about 12,708 vehicle-minutes a day—roughly 212 hours—losses that compound because breakdowns and collisions are not cleared quickly. When crashes occur, vehicles often remain in-lane for about 1.5 hours, pushing time lost and fuel wasted into the millions of dollars annually—before even counting the far greater congestion these blockages trigger.

Add it up, and the city’s unmanaged traffic exacts a toll conservatively estimated at well over USD three billion each year. For perspective: the flagship Corridor Project is estimated at about USD one billion over three years. Addis loses three Corridor Projects worth of value yearly—not to poor roads, but to poor stewardship.

Reclaiming the commons

Roads are a commons: they work only when access is tied to responsibility. This is the heart of the matter. Addis runs on the opposite logic—claims without duties, space without stewardship—and the result is visible at every junction. A license that signals competence, crossings that command respect, lanes kept clear, public transport run as a service rather than a scramble, enforcement that deters rather than negotiates: none of this is beyond reach. It demands restoring the idea that participation is earned, regulated, and—when abused—revoked.

The city’s road expansion and beautification projects may change how our streets look, but they will not change how they work unless this compact between access and responsibility is restored. Part 2 will take up that task. We will show how to make the license real again; how to defend right-of-way at conflict points (especially at light-rail stations); how to keep parked cars out of live lanes; how to professionalize minibus operations without wrecking livelihoods; and how to pilot ride-sharing and school-busing where they relieve the most pressure. The fixes are known. What has been missing is the will to treat the road as shared civic space—and to govern it as such.

Tsegaye Nega is Professor Emeritus at Carleton College (USA) and Founder & CEO of Anega Energies Manufacturing, an Ethiopian clean cookstove enterprise.

Contributed by Tsegaye Nega