Soaring Fares Strand Families on Highways

Jun 27 , 2026. By MASTEWAL ZEMENE ( FORTUNE STAFF WRITER )

At the country's busiest bus terminal, drivers wait, merchants shrink their margins and students ration trips home, as uncoordinated rules and an imported fuel shock price ordinary travel out of reach, reports MASTEWAL ZEMENE, FORTUNE STAFF WRITER

At the sprawling Lamberet Long-Distance Bus Station near Asmara Road, the usual din of engines and shouting conductors has given way to an eerie and sluggish rhythm.

Clusters of medium-sized Tata buses, minibuses and cross-country coaches sat idle in long rows. Rather than working the highways that bind the capital to the regional states, drivers huddle in small groups, swapping jokes to pass the time, a light-hearted veneer over deep anxiety about a rapidly cooling market.

Nearby, travellers lug overstuffed bags and plastic jerricans filled with holy water. Yet a growing number of people at the station were not travelling at all. Unable to afford the spiking ticket prices, they were reducing their lives to cargo, paying drivers a fraction of the fare to ferry packages to rural relatives instead of visiting them in person.

The scene at Lamberet has become the epicentre of a creeping logistical and social crisis spreading across the country, weighing on passengers and drivers alike. A mix of soaring operating overheads, uncoordinated regional rules, and general inflation is pushing cross-country transport beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, fracturing families and disrupting internal trade.

The pressure is not strictly local. According to the macroeconomic monitor published by Secure Africa Partners last month, headline inflation rebounded to 13.4pc year-on-year (YoY), reversing months of disinflation, after an escalating war in the Middle East drove up global oil, fuel and fertiliser prices. It disrupted supply chains, feeding into domestic food and transport costs.

For the men and women at Lamberet, that abstraction arrived as a daily bill. Every climb in the global oil price was eventually paid at a rural bus window, in the gap between a fare a family had budgeted for and the one a conductor now demands.

For operators and small-scale traders, the mathematics of the road no longer adds up.

Wakeyo Awas, 72, has spent more than half a century behind the wheel of heavy-load vehicles. Three years ago, he shifted to the Addis Abeba–Adama route to stay closer to home and support his five grandchildren, orphaned after their father died. The move has been brutal.

“Our travel frequency has cratered,” Wakeyo said. “We used to make two trips a day; now we’re lucky to get three dispatches a week. We sit and wait for our turn the following week. Meanwhile, the price of spare parts is rising daily without any government oversight. We’re living in perpetual tension.”

The pressure has already reached his household. His grandchildren have dropped out of school, a small private tragedy folded into a national one. Five decades on the road have left him with less security than when he started.

The squeeze ripples through the marketplace almost at once.

Fikadu Adinew, 55, a retired soldier with the rank of lieutenant, leans on a modest monthly military pension of 4,070 Br. To stretch it, he works as a small-scale butter trader, travelling three times a week from Sheno, a town near Debre Birhan renowned for its butter, to Addis Abeba, where he sells directly to household clients.

“The transport fare has increased from 100 Br to 250 Br for a single trip; it has more than doubled,” Fikadu said.

Carrying between 15kg and 30kg of butter each week and charging 1,200 Br a kilogram, he depends on a narrow customer base and cannot pass the higher costs to consumers. Each trip eats further into a pension that was never meant to stretch this far.

“My daily costs are climbing while my profit margins are evaporating,” he said. “At my age, supporting my family’s survival has become an uphill battle.”

The strain falls hardest on the country’s youth, above all, university students shuttling between campuses in regional states and the capital. As higher-education institutions exhaust their seasonal budgets near the onset of winter, campuses enforce strict checkout deadlines, sending thousands of students onto the highways at once and triggering demand-driven fare increases.

Supply does not move; demand spikes for a few crowded days, and the price follows.

Tigist Girma, a third-year Business Administration Information Systems (BAIS) student at Wolaita Sodo University, has watched her transport bill balloon over the academic year.

“In September, the fare from Addis to Sodo was 700 Br on a Tata bus,” Tigist said. “By the January break, it was 850 Br. Two weeks ago, I paid 1,300 Br.”

For female students, the squeeze forces hard trade-offs.

“We’ve non-negotiable costs like sanitary products,” she said. “When transport takes everything, we’ve to cut back significantly. We’re entirely dependent on families who can’t even send money regularly.”

For Bereket Teshome, a second-year student at the same university, the distance has become more than geographical. He once visited his family in Shashemene, in Oromia Regional State, several times a year. Now, with fares having doubled, a trip home has become an unaffordable luxury.

He missed the Easter holiday and a major family reunion this year because he could not bear to ask his cash-strapped family for transport money.

“When I went home two months ago, the bus fare was 390 Br at the station,” he said. “But as we’re about to leave, they charged an additional 300 Br, an amount we had no choice but to pay.”

According to Bereket, a classmate recently missed the funeral of a close relative for the very same financial reason. The road, once a thread that held scattered families together, has become a barrier between them.

Even on relatively prosperous corridors such as the Addis Abeba–Adama route, drivers are buckling under rising overheads and shifting policy regimes.

Solomon Bedasa, a driver with five years of experience, pays 10,000 Br a month in rent for his home in Adama, where he lives with his wife and two children. He operates a commercial vehicle under a strict bailee arrangement.

He pays the vehicle owner a fixed 4,000 Br for every working day, on top of fuel, traffic fines. The figures leave little room for a bad week, and bad weeks have become the norm. On a three-day week, the fixed daily payment to the owner alone can swallow much of what the route brings in.

Recent municipal and regional transport directives have further complicated matters. Tighter enforcement of regional licence-plate designations means Solomon can no longer pick up intra-city taxi passengers within the capital. He is confined to countryside routes. Thinner passenger volumes and an 8:00pm operational curfew have cut his working week to three days.

The fall in earnings forced Solomon to withdraw his children from private schools and enrol them in underfunded public ones.

“What used to be a stable livelihood has turned into a daily battle for survival,” he said.

However, not every operator faces the same arithmetic. According to Berhane Zeru, chairman of the Ethio-Africa Transport & Trade Share Company, tariffs for his company are regulated by the Transport Ministry, unlike those of long-distance luxury buses, which have seen substantial fare increases.

The numbers tell the story. The fare from Addis Abeba to Dire Dawa was 2,000 Br two months ago but has since climbed to 2,650 Br. The fare from Woldia to Addis Abeba has jumped from 2,350 Br to 3,400 Br, while the fare to Arba Minch has moved from 1,900 Br to 2,560 Br.

Each jump lands on a household already absorbing a higher price for bread, fuel and rent.

The mounting pressure on passengers and operators is in sharp contrast to the government’s long-term ambitions for the sector. Under its 10-Year Perspective Plan, beginning in 2020, transport officials envision a system capable of meeting the country’s fast-growing mobility needs.

Road transport, which already carries more than 95pc of domestic passenger demand, is projected to support 1.5 billion intercity trips a year by the end of the decade, up from 722 million trips recorded in 2019.

The strategy seeks to expand the national road network to 245,942Km, expand railway infrastructure to nearly 4,000Km and raise the number of standardised airports from 22 to 28. It also aspires to increase long-distance public bus stations from 690 to 732 and cross-country routes from 225 to 384, while attracting private investment in mass transport to ease chronic shortages in bus services.

It is a blueprint for abundance. On the tarmac at Lamberet, it reads like a promise from another country.

The plan concedes that existing capacity has struggled to keep pace with demand. It notes that passengers in cities such as Bahir Dar, Gondar and Meqelle can wait as long as three hours for a bus because fleet capacity falls short of growing travel demand.

Officials of the Ministry of Transport & Logistics did not respond to repeated inquiries from this newspaper about unregulated cross-country fare increases and what provisions, if any, exist for students stranded at the close of a semester.

Economists warn that the gridlock in the sector threatens the broader economy. Transport works as the circulatory system of national output, shaping commercial liquidity, environmental efficiency and social cohesion.

“Transport is the blood vessel of a nation’s systems,” said Birhanu Zeleke (PhD), a transport management lecturer and development studies expert at Kotebe Metropolitan University. “When the transport sector is inefficient, national development is undermined.”

According to Birhanu, the erosion of domestic connectivity sets off a process of “de-development”, in which the links between surplus-producing agricultural zones and deficit-ridden urban consumer centres begin to break down.

“If the system is fluid, everything becomes simple,” he said. “But when connections weaken, both the farmer and the consumer lose out. The farmer cannot bring produce to market, and the consumer faces artificially inflated food prices.”

Recent logistics studies hosted by CGSpace, an open-access institutional repository for agricultural research, found that rural areas supply between 40pc and more than 90pc of Addis Abeba’s food commodities, depending on the category. When the buses stall, so does the chain that feeds the capital.

A delayed truck not only results in a late delivery but also leaves goods rotting in one place while prices rise elsewhere.

Resolving the crisis, according to Birhanu, requires immediate and coordinated state intervention rather than fragmented regional policymaking. He urges transport authorities to redesign rules that look beyond localised enforcement and prioritise broader national goals of low-cost, accessible and competitive transport corridors.

“The authorities need to establish a clear objective of making the transport sector efficient, competitive and affordable,” Birhanu said. “Unless we repair these arterial links, we risk falling backwards in every aspect of our development. Weak transport implies a stagnant economy.”

Back at Lamberet, the engines stayed quiet a while longer. The drivers wait for a dispatch that comes less often, the traders weigh shrinking margins, and the students count out fares they can no longer cover. The road is still there. Fewer and fewer can afford to travel.

For now, waiting is the market’s one reliable export.

PUBLISHED ON Jun 27,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1365]