Access Granted: Unlocking Opportunities through Better Urban Transport

Douala is Cameroon’s main port and its largest urban center. While many people move to Douala in search of a better life, the size of the city and the local transport conditions make it challenging to access opportunities. As the city sprawls along the Wouri river, the growing flow of commuters puts a huge strain on transport infrastructure. The bus network is inefficient and accounts for less than 1% of trips. Congestion is rapidly increasing. In many parts of the city, road infrastructure remains largely inadequate. In that context, the only viable solution for most residents is to walk or use informal modes of transport. Taxis and mototaxis are considered expensive and unsafe.

The lack of reliable transport options has a significant impact on people’s mobility and on their quality of life, especially for the poorest. Every morning, it’s the same story: young children are put into taxis to go to school, countless productive hours are wasted crossing the Ndokoti intersection, which sees more than 7,500 vehicles per hour in peak periods, including a rising number of mototaxis. In a bid to improve the situation, the city of Douala recently adopted a sustainable urban mobility plan that will fundamentally transform the urban transport network, starting with the implementation of a new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). This mass transit system is bus-based with dedicated lanes and its own right of way at intersections, allowing it to be frequent and fast. Integrated to a conventional bus system which feeds into the main corridors, it improves the capacity and reliability of the whole public transport system. The Douala Urban Mobility Project (PMUD) reflects a growing trend in Africa: eight corridors are already in operation and twelve additional cities are planning to build BRTs. That includes Dakar and Abidjan, where the World Bank is also providing financing toward the implementation of BRT corridors.

But adding one route to the transport network is not enough. The whole system needs to be restructured to make sure all parts of the city can be connected. Urban developments need to occur along the redesigned transport network to better serve the residents, paying attention to the poorest and most vulnerable communities. Ultimately, this is about allowing the poorest to safely access more job opportunities, allowing students to reach their university, and allowing women and children to access health services in time.

So, how can we ensure the new transport system will meet these objectives and adequately serve the needs of users? To address this question, our team conducted an extensive accessibility study that compares conditions before and after the implementation of the BRT and feeder network. This will help us identify the priority areas along feeder lines that will benefit from urban development through the project.

In urban transport, we evaluate the performance of the transport network based on ‘accessibility’ indicators, which reflects how many people can access key opportunities – jobs, schools, health facilities, markets – within a certain amount of time. It illustrates clearly the benefits that transportation provides, connecting people with destinations given the travel times on the network. With the great help of the City of Douala in providing recent data, as well as open source tools, we compared accessibility with and without the BRT. While crunching the numbers, we accounted for the expected rise in traffic congestion over the next few years. We developed a poverty map of Douala to understand the impact on low-income residents, who are most dependent on the transit network. Not only did we assess the impact on jobs, but we also looked at human capital opportunities like access to healthcare or education, which are key to achieving development.