Addis Ababa Opens a 1.42-Kilometre Link From Filwoha to Churchill Avenue

The Addis Ababa City Roads Authority has opened a 1.42-kilometre road corridor linking Filwoha, Old Kera and Churchill Avenue, a widened stretch meant to take pressure off traffic in the city centre.

Short road, central block

A 1.42-kilometre link is a modest piece of construction with a disproportionate catchment. Filwoha, Old Kera and Churchill Avenue bracket some of the densest commercial ground in the capital — hotels, ministries, wholesale and retail trade — and the routes between them have been the choke point rather than the roads leading into the district.

For firms moving goods or staff through the centre, the value of a connector like this is not the distance saved but the queue avoided. Whether it delivers that depends on what happens at the two ends, which is where the traffic that used the old corridor now arrives.

The question that follows the ribbon

The city has been pressing on with road upgrades while transport demand rises, and the programme has drawn persistent questions about costs against benefits. Those questions are not answered by an opening.

The arithmetic a business reader would want is simple and is not published: what the 1.42 kilometres cost, what the expected time saving is across the corridor, and what the compensation and displacement bill came to for the properties the widening passed through. Urban redevelopment in Addis has repeatedly produced visible infrastructure alongside an invisible ledger.

Open

The City Roads Authority has not disclosed the project cost, the contractor, the construction period, or any traffic modelling behind the expected improvement. Nor has it published what the widening required in the way of expropriation along the route.

Sources: Birr Metrics, 26 October 2026