The Influence of Street Configuration on the Informal Roadside Economy: a Case of Ongata Rongai

Abstract

Informal street activities have often been relegated to the fringes of planning and considered a form of commercial sprawl. This is mostly due to lack of frameworks to study and analyze informal street activity. This research delves deep into the motivations and factors that attract informal street vendors to specific locations in the street. The thesis postulates that the most preferred areas will correlate with natural movement connectivity analysis that considers depth and other variables like street width and intervisibility that collectively encompass the street configuration. The study was done in Nkaimoronya and Ongata Rongai ward, along a 721-meter stretch along the most connected section of Ongata Rongai and involved 91 respondents who were sampled in a stratified random manner with an aim to find out what characteristics of the street configuration attracts informal street activities to a specific area and to determine interventions on the street configuration so that quality of informal street activity may be improved. The data was able to show a correlation between different modes of traffic and connectivity values of between 0.6 and 1(strong). However, there was a very low (0.29) correlation between the distribution of informal businesses and connectivity values of the specific zones. This would imply that the market is no longer benefiting from the high degree of connectivity offered by the street configuration but is acting as destination since the average proportion of walk-in customers (92.3%) is higher than specific return customers (7.7%) to whom the informal business is a destination. The study found a high coverage of local tax regime with 93.4% compliance, with no public facilities like public toilets, public water supply, electricity, and proper waste disposal. The study proposes an optimum scenario that can be implemented so that the street configuration accommodates a larger amount of street activity combined with efficient streets that still function as movement channels. The efficacy of the solution is measured by the increased connectivity value of the street network and the quantity of street activity supported.