World News| Chinese-funded Addis Ababa light rail repair in Ethiopia needs 60 million US dollars

Ethiopia [East Africa], Jan. 25 (ANI): Repairs to more than 23 trains on the Addis Ababa light rail will cost a total of US$60 million, officials said. According to Ethiopian news publication The Reporter, 23 trains were out of service due to a lack of spare parts.

Addis Ababa Light Rail in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is the first light rail and rapid transit in East and sub-Saharan Africa.

Read also | Tourists flock to Macau gaming hub during Lunar New Year after COVID restrictions lifted – Latest tweet from Reuters.

According to The Reporter, the two-way light rail was built to make up for the lack of traffic in the capital of four million people.

The 31.6 km long electrified light rail transit system was financed by the Export-Import Bank of China. It was inaugurated eight years ago and aims to serve 60,000 people an hour.

Read also | Washington Post layoffs: US media giant lays off 20 newsroom employees and closes gaming department.

The east-west line of the system is 17.4 kilometers long, and the north-south line is 16.9 kilometers long. It was built by the China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group Corporation (CREEC).

Officials stalled for years before finally acknowledging that the project wasn’t going as planned, despite a performance review by the federal auditor general showing most of the vans were out of service, The Reporter reported.

Speaking to reporters, Mitku Asmare, director of Addis Ababa’s transport agency, admitted that 23 of the light rail system’s 40 trains are currently out of service due to lack of spare parts. Management of the light rail system has recently been transferred to his bureau.

“Our assessment shows that $60 million is needed for spare parts,” Mitku said, as quoted by The Reporter.

The Addis Ababa municipal government provided a subsidy of 1 billion Ethiopian birr for the operation of the light rail, as ticket sales were not enough to cover its monthly operating costs.

Today, the light rail carries 56,000 people on just 18 trains, but it could carry more than double that number if all the trains were running, according to the Reporter. (Arnie)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)