5 Ways to Ease Dar’s Traffic Congestion Without Spending a Dime

Like many urban centres in Africa, Dar es salaam is notorious for its traffic jams. While the government is implementing multiple projects to improve feeder roads and transit networks, many people still spend 2.5 hours or more commuting to-and-from work every day. As a result, the average working time is only two times the commuting time, leading to losses of billions of shillings every day.

To gain some perspective, a mean travel time index (TTI) in Dar – a measure of traffic congestion – is twice that of Los Angeles, which has almost twice the population size, ten times the number of vehicles, and is the highest in the US. Infrastructure disparities aside – this shows that the gravity of our situation is mostly correlated to factors others than the number of vehicles and population size. In short – the quality of decisions leaders make.

Five ready-to-go solutions which can be used to improve the situation without spending a dime are presented here:

1.     Improve Public Transport

Increased motorisation increases traffic congestion. Given that 100 vehicles enter this city every day, adding to the existing fleet of about 700,000, this shows that the people of Dar are not fond of their public transport. Only 67% of us use public transport, compared to, for example, 90% of Hong Kong-ers. If the figure were to rise to 75%, by halving the number of people that use private transport, the impact could be equivalent to having all the six phases of DART completed today.

To encourage people to switch to public transport, especially middle-class car owners, it must be made passenger friendly. Buses should be less crowded, more formal and noise-free. Conductors should be forbidden from banging the body of the bus, making loud noises to call passengers, and, as someone once said, packing people like sardines. Moreover, we should use spacious high capacity buses which can carry up to 150 people. Welcome the ‘Icarus’ and double-decker buses back.

2.     Prioritise DART over Flyovers

The essence of a transit-oriented system, such as DART, is to provide an end-to-end quality of service guarantee, therefore encouraging people to use public transport. When DART’s project is complete it will make it possible for 73% of the population to reach the city centre within 60 minutes.

Alternatively, further investment in flyovers – or highways in general – encourages the use of personal vehicles and may prove counterproductive as observed elsewhere. Flyovers ease traffic at specific junctions – by pushing it to subsequent junctions. Thus, in isolation, their impact is limited. So, instead of pouring billions on interchanges – 350 billion for Mfugale and Ubungo so far – one could focus on a transit system such that a vast majority of the population will be within a walking distance of transit stations.

(NB: We can understand the lure of flyovers: they provide that much-needed modern ambiance to this god-forsaken city, don’t they? Who can resist the temptation of building them?)

3.     License Private Operators to Use DART’s Network

While phase 1 of DART has a capacity to carry 400,000 to 500,000 passengers, utilisation remains at most 50%. The infrastructure is first class but the system is not working – the buses are massively overcrowded and feel just like glorified daladalas. Personally, twice I have had to leave DART’s stations to go to board a daladala. Imagine that.

In line with number 2 above, the government has the option to license or subcontract other operators to increase bus capacity and improve operational performance. This is the kind of option that has been used in cities such as Lagos and it is the same rationale that was used to introduce daladalas as subcontractors of UDA in 1983. So, we have been here before.

4.     Make the city polycentric

Dar is monocentric – a nightmare situation for traffic management. But, with planning, it is possible to develop certain areas into fully fledged mixed business and residential hubs. Think of Sinza-Mwenge ‘district’ for example.

The district has one main artery, the Shekilango road – currently a 4km long shopping street that is busy until late at night. It’s surrounded by roads whose skyline is dynamically changing to accommodate businesses. Therefore, with a smart plan, the district can easily become a hub which will reduce traffic to other areas.

Dar can use several such hubs where people will now be expected to walk to their offices. The hubs should be vertical rather than horizontal; mixed-use and mixed-income rather than segregated; with auto-free streets and green-edges alongside rivers and roads.

5.     Change the Use of Kariakoo Market

We covered this argument in an earlier article called ‘Case for gentrification of Kariakoo’. Our infrastructures are developed with a premise of taking people to the city centre fast, but why do they have to go there? Kariakoo market, as we argued then, has long outlived its utility and its functions should be distributed to multiple centres, possibly along the lines discussed in number 4 above.

Have we demonstrated that this can be done without spending a dime? Tell us your thoughts through in the comments section.

Cheers.