Urban travelers in Africa depend on minibus taxis for their daily social and business commuting. This paratransit system is loosely regulated, self-organizing, and evolves organically in response to demand. Our study used floating car data to analyze and describe the movement characteristics of the minibus taxis in Kampala, Uganda. We made three intriguing findings. Firstly, in searching for, picking up and transporting passengers, minibus taxi trajectories followed a heavy-tailed power-law distribution similar to a "Lévy walk". Secondly, their routes gradually evolved. Thirdly, the extraordinary winding (expressed in terms of tortuosity) of the paths suggested the extreme determination of the drivers' search for passengers. Overall, we found that the passenger search strategies used by the taxis were significantly inefficient. Our findings could help city planners to build on the self-organizing characteristics of the minibus taxi system, and improve the mobility of travelers, by optimizing routes and the distribution of public amenities.
Most cities in sub-Saharan Africa rely for their public transport on paratransit in the form of fourteento twenty-seater privately owned and mostly old minibus taxis. The system is often seen as disorganized, unregulated and inefficient. To assess the accuracy of this picture, we analyzed the operations and economics of Kampala's minibus taxi system and its efficiency from the passengers' and the drivers' perspectives, using 'floating car data'. We found that the picture is largely accurate. Our findings suggest the need for moderate transformation: adequate enforcement of regulations, reorganization of ownership, renewal of fleets, and integration of ICT systems to facilitate scheduling, booking and fare collection. This will help to make the system safer, cleaner and more efficient for Kampalan commuters and more stable, secure and profitable for the minibus taxi drivers and the mini industries that depend on them.
Minibus taxi public transport is a seemingly chaotic phenomenon in the developing cities of the Global South with unique mobility and operational characteristics. Eventually this wide-spread fleet of minibus taxis will have to transition to electric vehicles. This paper examines the impact of this inevitable evolution on a city-wide scale in Kampala, Uganda. We present a generic simulation environment to assess the grid impact and charging opportunities, given the unique paratransit mobility patterns. We used floating car data to assess the energy requirements of electric minibus taxis, which will have a knock-on effect on the region's already fragile electrical grid. We used spatio-temporal and solar photovoltaic analyses to assess the informal and formal stops that would be needed for the taxis to recharge from solar PV in the region's abundant sunshine. The results showed that the median energy demand across all simulated days of the fleet of taxis was 220 kWh/d. This ranged to a maximum of 491 kWh/d, with a median charging potential (stationary time) across taxis of 8 h/d to 12 h/d. The median potential for charging from solar PV ranged from 0.24 kWh/m 2 to 0.52 kWh/m 2 per day, across the taxis. Our simulator and results will allow traffic planners and grid operators to assess and plan for looming electric vehicle roll-outs to the most-used mode of transport in Africa.
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