A Study on Railway Transport Demand Model in Ethiopia (A Case Study on Addis Ababa-Djibouti Line)
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Date
2014-09
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The growing Population and Economy of Ethiopia require efficient transport system. However,
the country's transport infrastructure with the exception of air transport is not developed; the
Country has poor road and rail transport network and density, one of the least in Africa, with
many challenges; financial, maintenance, professionals, and management problems.
Rail transport which started operations in 1901 is pioneer in the country; however, its fate
seems unfortunate. The road transport system has relatively better technological and
professional advancement. Despite the past shortcomings of railway transport, the Country has
now formulated an ambitious plan to develop a new railway network system with a length of
5,000 km.
This paper tries to fill the gap in the railway system planning and modelling unlike the country's
road transport; it is not developed but rather diminished and has not established working
manuals and standards. There have also been planning and management problems and as a
result, the previous Ethio-Djibouti Railway Company suffered huge losses in traffic and finance
and eventually was forced to quit operations.
The Direct Demand Model which is developed in this research is simple and can produce traffic
demand on single computation. It was, selected and analysed with variables of: economy,
population, travel distance and time, load capacity, environment, topography, energy, and
other variables (price, income, logistics, travel culture/behaviour, urbanisation,
multimodal/intermodal, technology, information communication technology(ICT), transport
demand management (TDM), and season etc); the model produced a 58/42 and 55/45 FREIGHT
and PASSENGER modal split for the year 2020; the result agrees with the AAU 2011 study of
60/40 Modal Split. In addition the model validated for road freight with Pearson Coefficientr=0.98
and
r
2
= 0.96.
The observation of Ethio-Djibouti rail line exhibits: a decline of rolling stocks and traffic with
loss in its revenue. This research has produced model from investment and strategic plan view
of land transport.
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Keywords
Railway Transport, Model, Ethiopia, Addis Ababa-Djibouti Line