Urban mass transport in Sub-Saharan Africa is made up of private, atomized operators. This market is responsible for meeting a critical transport need, yet market-level coordination, contracting and information frictions limit service offered in certain urban locations and for certain demographics, creating congested hubs and inefficient landuses, and a need for over-long trips, transfers, and preferences for motorcycles and growing private car ownership. We propose new primary data collection and a large-scale experiment designed to test whether there are groups (particularly women and informal workers) under-served by existing transit, and whether there are market failures in the spatial distribution of private-market transit that can be corrected using temporary route creation subsidies.
To test this, we build on a completed pilot in Kampala, Uganda, and plan to provide seed funding for up to 30 new routes across the city. By mapping origin-destination preferences, we will assemble a set of viable route proposals, and we will randomize them into funded and unfunded. We collect data both on passengers’ uptake and travel, and drivers incomes and operations. We address cost, time and vehicle-miles traveled reductions for passengers, and the overall equilibrium in the transportation system. We hypothesize that potentially profitable connections are failing to attract services due to lack of ability to coordinate between different operators across the city and raise the funds necessary to invest in the startup of new routes.
