The onerous daily commute has taken its
toll on her wellbeing and her livelihood. “It used to take me up to
three hours to travel from Kimara to Magogoni and back every day due to
traffic jams,”
explains Mrisho.
“I would aim to be on the road by 5:00
am at the latest in order to make it to the fish market before 8:00 am.”
In Tanzania’s business capital, Dar es Salaam, which is located along
the Indian Ocean, fish traders from various city suburbs rush every
morning to get to Magogoni, where auctions typically start at the crack
of dawn.
“The earlier you get to the market, the
more likely you are to get the best deals in terms of quality of fish
and price,” Mrisho adds.
Until last year, commuters like Mrisho
in Tanzania’s largest city relied on a public transport system dominated
by about 7,500 daladalas – loosely regulated commuter minibuses
operated by individual owners.
These would jostle each other for
passengers in the city’s epic traffic jams, where 10-minute trips easily
took more than three hours during peak times.
Since May 2016, however, this has
started to change with the first phase of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)
system and subsequent phasing out of the daladalas on the BRT’s route,
which has already significantly reduced travel time and costs for many
commuters.
The World Bank Group financed the first
phase of the BRT system under the Second Central Transport Corridor,
which was completed in 2015 and covers more than 20 kilometers of truck
routes.
With a fleet of 140 modern high-capacity
buses operated by the Usafiri Dar es Salaam Rapid Transit (UDA-RT)
ferrying commuters along segregated busways, the journey that once took
two to three hours has been reduced to between 30 and 50 minutes.
The UDA-RT is providing interim
services, while another private operator that is being competitively
procured will supply an additional fleet of 165 buses. This week, World
Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and Tanzanian President John Magufuli
unveiled the foundation stone for the second phase of the BRT.
It will entail the construction of the
Ubungo Interchange, a set of overpasses at a landmark intersection
leading into the city, which has been a bottleneck slowing transit on
the BRT.
The interchange is being built under the
Dar es Salaam Urban Transport Improvement Project (DUTP) which is
supported by a $225 million concessional credit from the International
Development Association (IDA) in addition to an IDA Scale-up Facility
Credit of $200 million.
At the launch event, President Kim
congratulated the Tanzanian government on the remarkable investment in
the BRT system and the decision to have it operated under a public
private partnership.
“Government leadership and public
spending will always be critical, but we’ve also learned that if the use
of public resources is strategically focused, we can dramatically
increase finance for development by crowding in private capital,” Kim
said in his speech.
“Countries can put in place reforms,
build the pool of bankable projects and deliver sustainable and
affordable infrastructure services.” Kim said leaders at the G20 meeting
in Germany, from which he had just traveled, had appreciated the urgent
need to rethink development finance.
“Aspirations and the global goals are so
expansive, and to meet them in a country like Tanzania, we need to
maximize the pool of resources for public development,” Kim said.
Dar es Salaam has a population of 4.4
million which has been growing rapidly at a rate of 6.5 percent per year
and is expected to become a mega city before 2030.
The city has major congestion and
mobility problems from a combination of rapid growth, an underdeveloped
road network, an increase in motorisation and portthrough traffic, and
the lack of efficient public transport.
“The journey from the Port of Dar es
Salaam takes a truck up to seven hours to Kibaha, a distance of just 28
kilometers,” laments Rahim Dossa, a member of the Tanzania Truck Owners
Association.
“This means we have to use more fuel and
this affects our bottom line.” The Dar es Salaam BRT is planned as an
extensive system of 137 kilometers of corridors to be built in six
sequential phases.
The African Development Bank and the
Africa Growing Together Fund, jointly with the Government of Tanzania,
are financing the ongoing construction of the $159 million second phase
of the BRT system totaling 20.3 kilometers.
“The BRT is another great example of how
strategic government investments can lead to private sector investments
and great outcomes for the people,” Kim said.
“Since the BRT opened last year, it has
reduced the roundtrip travel time on this corridor by 90 minutes a day,
saving commuters 16 days of sitting in traffic.” For many small-scale
fish traders like Mrisho, who sells her stock on the roadside in Kimara,
the BRT could transform her life for the better, as time saved in
transport means more money in her pocket, and greater peace of mind.
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