Evaluating the Sustainability of Urban Mobility And Traffic Growth in City of Addis Ababa
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Date
2019-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
t has been long since mobility became a major issue in Addis Ababa following the enormous
horizontal expansion of the city boundaries because of the rapid population and income growth.
The current transportation problem in Addis Ababa is at its boiling point, and worsening by the
day despite the government‘s attempt to address it. As transport system is an important part of a
city, success in insuring mobility can even be an indication of how well the city really is
organized. Failure to provide well-functioning transport system causes growing social, economic
as well as environmental problems. Spatial sprawl, infrastructural development and increasing
vehicular number are concurrent trends that need coordination among actors and policies for
sustainable development. Although there are studies conducted to understand and solve the
problems related to motorized transport in the city, most of them focus on the conventional
approach of improving the physical infrastructure of the transport sector to enhance the service
provision by constructing highways, extending road networks and increasing the number of fleet.
Measures that differ from the ones with the conventional focus of congestion and mobility
should be assed. The general objective of the study is to evaluate sustainability of transport
system in Addis. Although Sustainability is difficult to be measured directly, it can be evaluated
through a system of parameters and indicators constitute part of this process. A procedural
framework was developed to select potential local indicators for the current work. Data were
collected using different techniques at various stages. Existing database, unprocessed data from
surveys and processed data from spatial studies were among the sources used for data gathering.
Indicator parameters are obtained by means of formula calculation, extraction from previous
studies or other methods. The score of indicators are then calculated based on the parameter
value. In line with the results from the analysis, the sustainability of city transport system scores
2.69 out of 5 suggesting weak sustainable mobility conditions. The results of this application
highlight the priorities for the improvement of city‘s sustainable mobility conditions as presented
using a spider chart, which gives the disaggregated overview of the mobility performance.
Consequently, a shift towards more sustainable modes of transport like public and non-motorized
transport is needed. The trend analysis on vehicle growth also confirmed lack of attention for
these modes. Most of the trends indicate that the current traffic growth is unsustainable.
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Keywords
Sustainable transportation, urban mobility, Sustainability indicators, Addis Ababa, Traffic Growth, Private car ownership, Public transportation