Comparative analysis of public transport systems in African cities

Abstract

Paper presented at the 31st Annual Southern African Transport Conference 9-12 July 2012 "Getting Southern Africa to Work", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

This paper discusses the application of an assessment methodology on three African cities; Cape Town, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The purpose of the methodology is to do a comprehensive study on the performance of public transport systems in these cities. The methodology is used to describe, discuss and evaluate the public transport systems. A set of components and characteristics are needed to describe a public transport system of a city. The public transport goals and objectives of the cities are used to create a set of key performance indicators that will be used to evaluate and compare the public transport systems of the cities. The evaluation and comparison of the key performance indicators of public transport systems makes it possible to find realistic values for public transport objectives and to also build a database of the performance results. These results can be compared across different years to evaluate whether there has been any improvement in performance and if the strategies implemented are achieving the expected results. In this paper, the characteristics of the public transport systems of Cape Town, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam are described in detail as well as the evaluation of the performance of the public transport systems for all three cities. The results from the assessment on the three cities are compared across each other to give a clear overview of the public transport systems of the case cities. The aim of this paper is to present the results from the application of the assessment methodology on the three case cities. The results will represent the current status quo and qualities of the public transport systems of the case cities.