INTRODUCTION
This note records the main findings from initial inquiries into the transport sector at the macro and corridor levels under study. Missing information and the need for further follow-up studies will also be highlighted. The purpose of this note is to provide essential background information to the study team conducting the more detailed community, village and household interview surveys. In this way unnecessary questions might be avoided and those concerned with travel and transport may be sharpened.
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The focus of the inquiries was on those aspects that seem likely to have a significant impact on the livelihoods of the affected population. This necessarily limits interest to the road transport sector, since it has an overwhelming dominance of passenger and goods movement, and the temporal and spatial aspects of vehicle ownership and service provision. Road conditions per se are not a significant factor, since by design few of the study sites are in any apparent sense remote and therefore strongly influenced by physical restraints on access. However, this presumption will need to be confirmed in the field.
MACRO
Growth in the vehicle fleet
The national vehicle fleet appears to have increased rapidly since 1990 (Table1) with an apparent annual growth rate of 16%, although much of this may have been concentrated in the region of Kampala. However, the implied annual scrap rates that can be deduced from the figures for new vehicle registrations in Table 2, are suspiciously low in some cases. These suggest that the national vehicle fleet figures need to be treated with caution.
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At face value the number of trucks almost doubled and other 4-wheeled vehicles increased by factors ranging from 2.5 (buses) to 3.4 (pickups). But it is the increase in motorcycles by a factor of 12 that is most notable, although the number newly registered (Table 2) reached a peak in
1997 from which they have since declined by more than 50%, as has the total of all newly registered vehicles. Since 1999/2000 the growth in all vehicle types has slackened further under the influence of adverse external shocks - an increase in oil prices, the fall in the world coffee price 3 and stagnating export receipts, droughts in some parts of the country, and the European
Union’s ban on fish imports from Uganda [Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic
Development 2001].
Apart from Uganda’s strong economic growth in the 1990s another factor aiding the development of the road vehicle sector has been the relaxation since 1991 of government restrictions on the import of vehicles more than five years old. A sample analysis of the Ministry of Finance vehicle data base, established in 1994, shows that the import of used vehicles is
1 In recent studies a distinction is made between travel, which relates to what people undertake, and transport which is concerned with the movement of their goods, whether these are accompanied or unaccompanied [Barwell 1996].
2 One consultant estimate, based on roadside interview surveys and median life estimates, indicates that the national vehicle fleet in mid-1995 was substantial overstated. For cars, pickups, minibuses, large buses and trucks the estimated fleet total was only 50400 units. This compares with the 78525 units estimated from Table 1 (the average of the 1995 and 1996 figures), a 56% over-estimate.
3 The March 2001 International Coffee Organisation composite price was only 38% of that at the beginning of 1998
[Economist 2001].
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now the principal means of supplying the vehicle market in Uganda. Over 80% of the newly registered cars, vans, pick-ups and mini-buses were declared as used. With motorcycles it is thought, by informed observers, to be almost 100%. The only vehicle category where new vehicles continue to be in the majority is heavy buses.
The relative cheapness of used vehicles obviously increases the number of new owners since it lowers the price of entry. The downside of this policy is that most vehicle categories have a comparatively high average age (cars 9.4, pickups 6.9, minibuses 7.6, large buses 3.7, and trucks 9.6 years, respectively) so operating costs are relatively high, and spare parts are a major operational problem.
At a national level it is estimated that the proportional breakdown of total travel (in veh-kms) among the different vehicle classes is 11% motorcycles, 48% private vehicles, 20% public transport, and 21% commercial vehicles [Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications
2000b].
Types of services
The main services offered are by conventional stage buses, share taxis (matatus) , and both motorcycle and bicycle-based passenger and small goods carrying vehicles (boda boda) .
Conventional on demand (individual) taxi services are restricted to the major urban areas and appear to be in decline due to competition from boda boda , and to a lesser extent, matatu services. Bulk goods transport services can be expected to have relatively little influence on the livelihoods of the majority of the population due to the restricted size of the consignments in which they deal.
As elsewhere matatu services now dominate buses in all market segments except for longdistance passenger movement between major urban centers. By 1998 minibuses had increased their share of the passenger vehicle total to 29% from 14% in 1987, and the share of large buses had dropped to only 0.9% [Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications
2000a]. From Kampala there are currently 20 bus companies offering long-distance services to
19 district and regional centers in Uganda. 5 bus companies offer services to 3 international destinations – Congo, Kenya, and Rwanda.
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Boda boda primarily provide three types of short-distance services: (i) within the main urban areas where they compete with conventional taxis and matatus ; (ii) as feeders to urban areas on routes that - due either to the low density of demand or the roughness of the route - are unattractive to matatus ; and (iii) as feeders to the main roads in which role they tend to complement matatu and bus services. Bicycle boda boda are restricted to favourable (flat) terrain, comparatively short distances (normally < 5kms) and where the volume of motorised traffic does not militate against their use. Thus, bicycle boda boda dominate in Jinja and the motorcycle version in Kampala. In the smaller urban areas terrain seems to be the main factor dictating either bicycle or motorcycle use. Bicycles are preferred for their cheaper fares, but may not be able to cope either with the terrain or trip lengths demanded. Motorcycles are also said to have a greater accompanied load carriage capacity that in some cases would otherwise necessitate two bicycles. They are also preferred in the rainy season when bicycles are difficult to operate. While on average motorcycles travel further than bicycles, trips rarely exceed about
10kms, although trips from Mukono to Kampala (18kms) and even up to 40 kms are claimed.
4 Source : The Monitor Business Directory 2000
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The bicycle version of the boda boda services emerged in the region of the Kenya-Uganda border between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. They became more widespread in the early
1980’s. In contrast the motorcycle version is a phenomenon that has arisen only in the past decade. This type was not even mentioned in a major study of boda boda services in
September 1991 [Malmberg Calvo 1994].
The new registration statistics suggest that growth in the motorcycle version accelerated around
1994, although anecdotal evidence suggests that they did not really become prominent until around 1997. Some support to this is given by traffic count data (Table 4), which only records their presence in the vicinity of Jinja. Anecdotal evidence also indicates that Mukono District was the initial focus of growth due to push-pull factors associated with liberalised coffee marketing.
5 This gave dealers an incentive to penetrate into more rural areas in search of beans to buy, which was not possible using 4-wheeled vehicles due to the state of the roads.
Increased incomes from coffee sales also permitted more people to purchase motorcycles leading to further income growth. An interview with the Chairman of the Mukono Motorcycle
Operators and Owners Association indicates astonishingly high numbers of boda boda in the district currently, but these claims need to be checked.
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Both boda boda services represent a significant innovation in mobility enhancement that primarily appears to benefit low-income users. (A clear understanding of user profiles is currently lacking, although studies in Mpigi district provide a useful introduction that ought to be expanded [Iga 1999]). The ability to provide services in areas where the density of demand is insufficient to sustain motorised carriers is particularly notable, as are the employment generation, and backward and forward economic linkages resulting from their operation. As with matatu’s , there tends to be a surplus of operators over vehicles, with many working shifts or as relief (part-time) drivers and organisers e.g. Entebbe park has 500 drivers for 100 vehicles. This spreading of employment benefits is one of the features of the informal transport services industry.
Regulation and organisation of the service sector
The trucking industry is not currently regulated other than the requirement for a valid public service vehicle licence. Buses are licenced to provide services over a stage or specific stages of a nominated route. It has not proved practical to licence either matatu or boda boda services in this way. However, operational discipline is provided by the ‘associations’ to which most matatu and boda boda operators belong.
7 These associations have changed from their original character of a welfare service to members – mainly the drivers and conductors – to important business and political entities. Their main purpose now it is collect money from the industry not to put resources into its development. However, they do provide a rough and ready regulation of entry to the industry and control route and stage use.
It has been suggested by persons close to the industry that the matatu associations also exercise a considerable degree of control over who is employed and on fares, but both aspects are difficult to verify. One example of fare control is the practice of differential rates levied on
5 In Mukono district they are known as zabala a local word that means the high season of coffee.
6 He claimed 20,000 registered members, with perhaps 40,000 in the whole district. These are thought to operate
20,000 motorcycles and 5000 bicycles, with some 5000 motorcycles operating within the Mukono Town Council area.
7 Many use the term association in their title, but in other cases it is a club. All are in effect unions.
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passengers leaving Kampala compared with those arriving e.g. the fare to Entebbe is 1500shs, but the return is only 1000shs. The basis for this could not be established.
The dominance of the money collection role is definitely the case for matatus , but is probably less so for boda boda associations because their turnover is of a different and much lower order of magnitude. They still appear to function primarily as a union. Members pay an entry and annual fee. The association acts as their mouthpiece, represents them in cases of harassment by security personnel, traces members in cases of theft or their relatives if there is an accident, and enforces discipline and hygiene. They have trained educators for some of these purposes. In some cases the association also has a semi-banking (savings) and credit role for members.
The district authorities have the legal right to invite annual tenders from matatu or boda boda
‘associations’ to collect fees on their behalf from association members. These fees are for the right to use municipal parking facilities and to collect passengers. Such fees are usually significant contributions to municipal finances accounting for a reported 70% of council revenues in Jinja’s case.
8 It is widely believed that the associations are more efficient at money collection than the civic authorities, which have a history of fund leakage.
Because fee collection is a ‘cash’ business, and the sums of money involved are large, control of the main urban associations has become strongly contested and politicised. Also a largely uneducated labour force could not cope with either the technical or political complexity of the tendering process. Splits in the associations and takeover bids are common in what has been characterised as a mafia business that is more powerful than either the Police of Government..
It is not clear that either the operators or the public necessarily gain from the current tendering process. A recurrent contemporary issue is the complaint from operator associations that they perceive few benefits from the large sums they hand over to government. From the public perspective it is not clear that the industry is truly competitive and provides services at the lowest possible cost.
CORRIDOR
Route structure
The corridor is dominated by the main Kampala to Jinja highway, the most heavily trafficked in
Uganda. It is an international transit route, that services a densely populated area and bisects one of the main banana/coffee farming systems of Uganda. This corridor also contains a significant area of tea and sugar plantations.
The main road acts as a spine route and there are few parallel roads from or to which traffic might divert (Figure 1). There are also comparatively few feeder routes.
Variations in flow levels along the corridor
8 Other sources suggest that this figure may be much too high. Receipts from parking and operating licences and permits were reported to provide between 0.1% (in the case of Masaka) and 30.6% (in the case of Rakai) of the total revenue of each urban council. On average the contribution to total revenue was only in the region of about 10%
[Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications 2000a].
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For traffic and road accident monitoring purposes it is convenient to divide the main route into four sections as indicated in Table 3. Traffic levels at the easternmost end are only a fifth of those closest to Kampala where commuter flows are dominant. Minibuses dominate on all sections at 32-42% of the traffic, the proportion decreasing as one progresses east from
Kampala, but it rises slightly in the vicinity of Jinja. Pickups and 4-wheel drive vehicles are the next largest class at 19-27%, and exhibit a similar change in proportions to minibuses.
Traffic growth
Estimates of traffic growth on the main road are not available. Between 1989/90 and 1998 national average annual traffic growth was of the order of 5.5%, slightly higher on unpaved and slightly lower on paved roads [Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications 2000b].
Road accident characteristics
In common with most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa road accident levels in Uganda are comparatively high, especially in and around the capital and the main roads feeding into it. Fatal accident rates are reasonably constant along the corridor at an internationally high level (Table
3).
Organisation of services
Currently there are two major matatu associations operating in the study corridor. The Uganda
Taxi Operators and Drivers Association (UTODA) and Freeline Taxi Club, controlling operations in and from Kampala to Mukono and in Jinja and along the corridor as far as Lugazi, respectively. There are boda boda associations operating in Kampala, Mukono and Jinja. They represent both cyclists and motorcyclists, the proportions of each depending on the factors noted previously - terrain, trip distances and traffic levels. The Uganda Boda Boda Operators
Development Association, based in Jinja has some 1800 cyclists and 100 motorcyclists. They used to collect fees on behalf of the municipality, but lost the tender to an individual who has reportedly failed to collect efficiently.
The junctions of most of the feeder roads are the locus for boda boda services that provide interfaces for traffic to and from the hinterland. Most are motorcycle-based services. Interviews at some of the junctions suggest a considerable degree of market saturation with numerous operators competing for passengers. Most appear to belong to local route-specific associations, except where these converge on urban centers such as Mukono, Kugazi, Njeru and Jinja where area-based associations prevail. On rural feeder routes operations are controlled by a stage committee at each junction. Apart from the problems with spare parts and lack of demand, a recurrent complaint was of the danger of being killed in the course of the theft of the motorcycle by a passenger. At two places one such incident a month was quoted, but could not be verified.
This situation might well deter operators from long trips out of familiar territory and restrict them strictly to local services.
Operators showed a preference for 50cc motorcycles over those with a larger engine capacity.
The main consideration seems to be purchase cost. A 50cc motorcycle costs 1.4 million shs
(US$820) and one of 80cc 1.7 Million shs (US$1000). The annual licence fee is also charged at
145 shs (US$0.085) per cc per 12 months (i.e. US$4.27 for a 50cc motorcycle), so operating costs must be higher for the larger motorcycles. It is not clear if these can be passed onto passengers.
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Such a small engine clearly limits the payload and range. This must be especially the case in the hilly rural areas that characterise the study corridor, but more evidence on this aspect is required.
Household travel expenditures
Recent studies in Mpigi district, within 6-7 kms from Kampala, indicate that average expenditure on transport, including education and health-related travel, amounts to about 2.4% of monthly expenditure [Iga 1999].
SUMMARY
The main spine of the study corridor has an abundant and growing level of transport services.
Some forms – the motorised boda boda – are comparatively recent, and have become dominant in a very short space of time. It ought to be possible to trace their mobility benefits and impacts, as these should well within the recall of most respondents. However, it is not clear how extensive is the influence area of this system, or the extent to which a significant proportion of the population is not barred by income limitations, or other factors, from their use. Similarly the competitiveness of the system is difficult to judge, but the strength of the associations suggests a considerable degree of cartelisation.
ISSUES REQUIRING FURTHER STUDY
Little information has so far been acquired on vehicle ownership levels and temporal changes in ownership, but the national household surveys conducted by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics should be investigated. They are believed to be the source of the observation that the value (in dollar terms) of transport equipment owned by households has more than doubled in rural areas over the period 1992-2000 [Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development,
2001].
We need to know more about transport conditions – infrastructure, vehicle ownership and transport services – within each detailed study area (i.e. Banda, Seeta, Wakiso, Jinja, etc). In urban areas the situation is one in which infrastructure is perceived to have deteriorated drastically, and in which developments are normally ahead of physical planning i.e. there is no effective control of land use [Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications 1999].
We have little knowledge of the extent of matatu services off of the main Kampala
– Jinja travel corridor i.e. radiating from Mukono, Lugazi, Jinja, etc. Similarly in respect of the two forms of boda boda services – motorised and non-motorised.
When were fuel prices liberalised? They were still controlled in March 1994 [ World Bank 1994].
Why do matatu associations levy differential fares for passengers leaving Kampala relative to those arriving? Does this apply to other urban areas? Are there situations in which the practice does not apply? Do boda boda associations have a similar practice?
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REFERENCES
Barwell, I. (1996): Transport and the village - findings from African village-level travel and transport surveys and related studies . World Bank Discussion Paper No. 344, Africa Region
Series. Washington, DC.
Iga, H. (1999): Impact of bicycle/motorcycle taxi services (bodaboda) on women’s travel needs in Uganda – a case study of Mpigi District.
(mimeo).
Malmberg Calvo, C. (1994): Case study on intermediate means of transport: bicycles and rural women in Uganda.
SSATP Working Paper No. 12. World Bank
Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (2001): Uganda poverty reduction strategy paper – progress report 2001. Summary of poverty status report . February 8, 2001,
Kampala.
Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications (2000a): Uganda transport sector strategy study . June, Road Agency Formation Unit (IDC/Hyder/Parkman consultants). .
Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications (2000b): Road management and financing study . Executive Summary Volume 1. August, (BKS (Pty) Ltd).
Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications (1999 ): Review/update of feeder roads rehabilitation and maintenance strategy . The 1999 Strategy Report (Condensed Version).
October, Entebbe (Africon).
The Economist (2001): Trouble brewing.
pp 80-81. March 10 th – 16 th .
World Bank (1994): Republic of Uganda transport rehabilitation project . Volume 1, Staff
Appraisal Report 12579-UG. Eastern Africa Department. Washington, DC.
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