Dar es Salaam and Not-so Rapid Transit

In Tanzania’s capital Dar es Salaam, a 10-mile commute by car can take as much as two hours, and if you are scheduling business meetings you need to plan for an hour of travel each way. During rush hour, the police often convert both lanes of a two-way thoroughfare into one-way travel, with no advance notice, a sure recipe for gridlock, as traffic backs up behind cars waiting for two-way travel to resume, and no one knows when that may be.

Dar, like many cities in Africa, has experienced explosive population growth but its infrastructure, built for a much smaller population, has not kept pace. In 1990 the city had about 1.4 million people. Today it has around 4.2 million, representing an annual growth rate of nearly 4.5%, and growth continues to accelerate, with a projected population of 6.2 million by 2025 and over 21 million by 2050. Dar will become Africa’s fastest-growing city by 2020, against some formidable competition from other urban areas, and will achieve “megacity” status – a population of more than 10 million – by the early 2030s. According to Atlantic Media’s CityLab web site, New York City added 4 million people over the past 100 years, while Dar es Salaam will add 21 million over a similar period.  Continue Reading