ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that contemporary debates about who has the right to the road and how the city can best deal with its increasing congestion problem echoes similar debates about the meaning of automobility in the first half of the 20th century. It discusses the ethnographic fieldwork, media analysis, and archival research to explore the interconnected historical, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of debates about infrastructural planning and public transportation in contemporary Accra. In communicating aspirational forms of self-fashioning, warding off judgement and jealousy, and bemoaning the difficulties and challenges of contemporary urban life, drivers’ slogans form what Ato Quayson terms “the expressive archives of urban realities”. The process of Bus Rapid Transit adoption and implementation in Accra and elsewhere on the continent is far from exceptional. Drivers and passengers, then, are engaged in what is effectively a rebranding of the trotro system within the social, cultural, and economic context of the city.
