Dar es Salaam: 6 months down the road

We are facing a new set of challenges from modern living. According to the UN, just over half of the world’s inhabitants already live in urban areas; it’s projected that two-thirds of the global population will be city dwellers by 2050, amounting to an urban influx of 2.5 billion people in the next few decades.

It’s no wonder, then, that some of the most pressing issues of the modern age is how we solve the logistics of the Urban Sprawl. How can we help millions of people go about their daily business — along with millions of others — with the least amount of disruption?

From supply-and-demand to user-driven data

Transport is undoubtedly one of the biggest topics within any discussion on urban living — how can we make it more efficient, more pleasant, more eco-friendly? How do we foresee and remedy travel chaos? How do we stop roads being gridlocked? How do we create more efficient routes?

At Door2Door we want to tackle the particular challenge of mobility and public transport by turning the tables from the old-fashioned supply-and-demand system to one fully based on commuters’ needs. And at the core of our vision is data.

We source and analyse data in order to provide smarter travel solutions. But while for developed economies, open-sourcing the data has been a logical evolution, a “no-brainer”, emerging economies are still struggling with the mere logistics of sourcing and processing data. To tackle this we need collaboration, technology, civic innovation and community.

The challenges of developing cities

This is why Door2Door was thrilled to get together with the World Bank to literally put Dar Es Salaam on the map; and our mutual collaboration and hard work has delivered some great results for the struggling yet promising Tanzanian city.

The first step for gathering any transportation data is to have an adequate mapping foundation. Although several attempts had taken place in previous years to map the city, it wasn’t until the summer of 2015 when, requested by the World Bank and supplied by drone imagery from Ramani Huria, a local community mapping project, that Door2Door and the Humanitarian OSM team joined forces to map Dar es Salaam on OpenStreetMap.

Starting with the roads and main buildings, within just a few months the goal was fulfilled: the entire grid of the city was mapped. This allowed us to lay down the basis to start transforming the city and helping it face the challenges that its exponential growth have posed through the years.

But this was just the beginning, Once the map of the basic grid became a reality, the World Bank then kicked off an additional project to track and gain knowledge of the organised chaos that public transport has turned into when growth has quickly outpaced the capacity of the city to provide efficient mobility services.

How to track chaos?

This is an all-too-known situation, not only in Dar Es Salaam: just look around all developing economies; the creative solutions come from the citizens in the form of artisanal, informal, concessioned, laissez-faire transport.

You could almost peg them as old-school entrepreneurs!

In the case of Dar, we’re talking about the Daladalas: local buses that everyone uses to move around the city.

So how was it done? In essence, “Hand-tech made” — which means that it required the use of technology, but the tracking was nonetheless field work. As such, the World Bank put together a group of mapping enthusiasts from the University to track all Daladala routes. Equipped with a smartphone tracking app or GPS tracking devices and the list of all the routes, off they went to record each route from its starting point till the end and back.

We literally learned from experience, and in order to track more efficiently we took note of the whole experiment as a team and individually, so that now we can develop a tracking tutorial for the future projects.

The next step was to turn the tracked data into a comprehensive map. Working hand in hand, the World Bank Innovation team and Door2Door’s mapping department developed a process to import the tracked Daladala routes into OpenStreetMap, so that they would be available to various organisations.

Through these process, data becomes Open Source — which allows anybody to make use of it to develop solutions for different issues concerning transport and mobility. (One of the other challenges in Dar Es Salaam was its lack of resilience against the effects of climate change such as flooding).

Data holds the key

Door2Door took this data, processed it further and made it available in the ally mobility app. Based on this high-quality information, the ally app has fully launched and is now freely available to ease the daily commute and allow people to move safely from A to B. However, Daladalas are not the solely mean of public transport in Dar, hence the app also includes trains, ferries and the soon-to-be-launched BRT system.
But this is just the beginning, not only a one-off fruitful partnership: thanks to making this data open, it can contribute to many and diverse solutions which will make Dar Es Salaam city’s mobility and transport smarter, more resilient and ready to face the future.

Written by Isabel Flores on February 5, 2016.