Engineering Accessibility in Nairobi City by Road Transport Infrastructure in the Face of Climate Change Dilemma

Globally, climate change continues to present a monumental dilemma in all sectors of the economy. In the urban road transport system, it has become a norm that short distances between places end up consuming longer hours of travel by motorists on rainy days. This prolongation of travel time is occasioned by flooding risks. This makes places inaccessible. Accordingly, this study aimed at improving the accessibility of Nairobi city neighborhoods during wet weather. This informs the reason for use of the term, “engineering accessibility” which simply means to reduce travel time during wet weather between destinations. The study leverages the theory of infrastructure resilience in an attempt to extract developmental data in terms of mapping in the GIS Software environment, the incremental strides in road network lengths and tracing the incremental building footprints over the time scales covering years; 2000,2010,2020 and 2024.Secondly, rainfall data was sourced from KMD open source database that assisted in the development of flood map profile over the same time scale in HEC-RAS software. In the year 2000, built up area covered,50km squared, and the road network totaled 9630km.The worst flood depth recorded around Ojijo road in the period was 0.63m.In 2024,built up area was 83km2,road length was 14,720 and the flood depth at the same location was 1.83.This was the worst as exhibited in figure 3.In conclusion, the study has highlighted the need to mainstream resilience in storm water drainage system by deploying a continuous action plans.