Search

In Ghana, paratransit services (three-wheeler taxis) have gained prominence because of their role in solving urban mobility challenges in major cities. While they are good at solving urban mobility challenges, they cause accidents and create congestion and inconveniences in the central business districts of cities. However, the literature on how paratransit service operators organise and create spaces for their operations is limited. We draw on peripheral urbanisation theory to understand how the operators produce urban spaces to conduct business in Kumasi. We hope to provide information for the planning and design of infrastructure that meets the needs of the different modes of urban mobility. In doing so, we adopt interviews and focus group discussions involving 35 purposively selected operators, 16 union executives, and two officials from the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly to elicit the data. The responses were coded and categorised into themes for presentation. Findings indicate that the operators create space through negotiation and site selection. We conclude that securing spaces to conduct business is a major challenge to operators. Therefore, Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly should partner with communities, investors, and operators to create spaces for paratransit operators as it can provide a major source of revenue for development projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that geographic data in Ghana and most of Sub-Sahara Africa is patchy, and lack geographic coverage and detail. This has implications for mobility and access to socioeconomic, and cultural opportunities which require address and location data typically provided through geocoding. A critical component of geocoding is a reference database to lookup matching address and location information. Accordingly, we investigate the suitability of, and the use of electoral polling stations to build a reference database for geocoding. This was undertaken by mapping their geographic coordinates, analyzing their geographic spread and detail, and outlining the database structure for building the reference database. Using the 2020 electoral polling station data for the Greater North area of Ghana, we found that 93% of the geographic coordinates can be obtained from open data sources. Also, there is high proximity with a nearest neighbor distance of 663 m, a reasonable service area of 4300 m, and a median distance of 3700 m from a community location. The widespread availability, large geographic spread and moderate detail, make polling stations a creditable data source for geocoding. It is recommended the polling station data be augmented with a detailed geographic data like those from landmarks and paratransit service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bus rapid transit (BRT) is considered the cheapest and fastest to implement mass transportation system compared to rail and tram. However, the implementation of BRT becomes complicated where there are incumbent paratransit service providers. In African cities, it has become mandatory to include these operators because they are the most extensive public transport service providers, employ many people, and make governments unpopular when excluded. In Accra, the government sought to implement BRT with the inclusion of incumbent paratransit operators but could only implement a conventional bus service. This article analyses the approach adopted to examine the reasons behind the inability to execute the planned BRT and draw lessons from the Ghana experience. This article adopted informal transportation and BRT characteristics based on the African experience to analyse the incorporation of incumbent paratransit operators in Ghana. The findings show the challenges the implementing agency encountered, resulting in a shift from BRT to a conventional bus. The underlying reason for the difficulty is the depth of change required by both paratransit operators and government institutions. Given the depth of change for capital investment, capacity, and governance reforms required, the paper recommends a more gradual BRT implementation approach in African cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Address and location challenges are global, yet sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) is the most poorly referenced geographically due to poor spatial referencing of mobility infrastructure and landmarks, poor road layout, and informal settlements. But there is a widespread use of informal geographic referencing especially for paratransit service, and landmarks including schools, hospitals, and markets, which are not mapped. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to generate a reference database for geocoding purposes by taking advantage of address points of landmarks and paratransit (trotro) services. The reference database was generated for the Oforikrom municipality of the Ashanti region in Ghana, and validated by geocoding 108 preprocessed local addresses. The results show a 100% match rate between the 108 addresses and the reference database, with 10% of those matches determined by qualitative and approximate spatial relations. The match‐rate was 88% with no preprocessing of the input addresses. Point‐based geocoding was found to be the most practicable approach to develop a reference database for geocoding addresses in SSA, or areas characterized by lack of geographical referencing. The widespread usage of landmarks and paratransit for geographic referencing in SSA provides the potential to adapt this study to countries/areas with informal settlements and poor geographic referencing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to public transport is widely recognized as a welfare and livelihood issue. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), public transport is predominately paratransit which holds the largest modal share. Paratransit services are often accessed through their terminals and service routes, critical elements which directly distribute the service to populations. However, the allocation of paratransit terminals and routes is rarely equitable in SSA, where they are often erratic, dedicated to profitable routes, and vehicles not available on some routes and at certain times of the day (e.g. night time). Consequently, this study evaluates the allocation of paratransit terminals and routes, their access to populations, and overall coverage in the Oforikrom Municipality of Ghana. This was achieved by compiling General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS)-like data, conducting a nearest neighbor analysis and a service area estimation, and evaluating the allocation of paratransit service routes. The findings show that paratransit allocation is highly inefficient being associated with fragmented routes and poor connectivity, where the travel distance to paratransit service ranges from 1 to 2800 m, and existing routes can be reduced considerably by 53%. A close matching with an R-square of 0.977 was found between the proportion of the population served by paratransit and the coverage of the land area where they live. Economic status based on the relative wealth index was found to be moderately related to the travel distance to paratransit services, the population served, and the land area covered. While paratransit operators and driver unions have their roles, the inefficient configuration of terminals and routes is a direct outcome of the existing systemic structural arrangement with paratransit operators mostly built on underlying political economy, social injustice, labor exploitation, and lack of investment. It is recommended that enhanced paratransit allocation be co-formulated, co-developed, and co-enforced by all stakeholders, especially local governments, driver unions, paratransit operators, passengers, and pedestrians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road networks are by far the largest mobility infrastructure in Sub-Sahara Africa, and are key to providing access to economic and social opportunities. Yet the majority of road networks in Ghana and other countries in Sub-Sahara Africa are not geographically referenced, to facilitate their uses for road maintenance and management, transport planning, emergency services, disaster cases, logistics, tourism and other location based services. Consequently, this study takes advantage of paratransit service and the location of landmarks to provide location addressing of road networks in Ghana. The paratransit service, popularly known as Trotro in Ghana is a local transit system that uses an automobile to move people and goods along a prescribed travel route on a road network, with locally known stops where people get on and off the vehicle. The Trotro service is popular in Ghana, yet there is no critical investigation demonstrating its spatial coverage, relevance as a credible location addressing for road networks, or as a comprehensive location data for location based services. This study provides evidence for this case, and investigates the spatial coverage of road networks used by the Trotro vehicles, and the mapping of their service stops together with landmarks in the Asokore Mampong Municipality (AMM) of Ashanti region in Ghana. It was found that the location data from both Trotro service and landmarks covered about 86% of the entire road network in AMM; providing a large coverage of the road network and greater geographic detail. A service area estimation undertaken using the generated location data shows a high geographic accessibility, with travel distances as low as 160 m from any location to the nearest Trotro service or landmark covering about 80% of the road networks. These results show the capability of the generated location data to tackle the problem of spatially unreferenced road networks, and to significantly improve their effective uses. The popularity of paratransit in Sub-Sahara Africa means that this study can be adapted to other countries where the majority of the road networks are not spatially referenced. • Characterized the spatial coverage of roads used by paratransit and key landmarks. • Location data from paratransit and key landmarks have high coverage and detail. • Ensuing data has high spatial accessibility based on service area estimation. • Paratransit and key landmarks provide credible location data for road networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]