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Technical University of Mombasa

1.0 TRANSPORTATION POLICIES

A ‘policy’ is a guiding principle or course of action that is adopted to progress towards an
objective. Evaluating the current state of a system and choosing directions for change may be
considered as policy making.
Just as it is important to clearly define the goals and objectives of transport plans, it is also
necessary to define the national transport policy. The policy should be conceived to achieve the
goals and objectives. The policy should lay down how by regulation, taxation, subsidies or
encouragement the government intends to accomplish the task of achieving the goals and
objectives. The policy should be implemented by the government through legislative and
planning measures.

The goals and objectives of the transport policy plan may lay down the following important
policy objectives:

a) To remove transport bottlenecks which have acted as serious constraints in the movement
of people, industrial and cultural goods and in the promotion of international trade and
tourism industry.
b) To create adequate additional capacity in the transport sector to meet the requirements of
anticipated trade and other development sectors.
c) To conserve energy such as diesel, petrol, etc. as much as possible
d) To evolve a high degree of co-ordination with the transport sector and with user
organization to make optimum use of available capacity.
e) To give priority to completion of on-going works.
f) To maximize the utilization of existing assets or infrastructure through high productivity.
g) To evolve a rational pricing structure in the sector of transport undertakings so as to
ensure they are running on profitable basis and contributing adequately to the national
resources.
h) To give special attention to the transport needs of remote and isolated areas such as
North-eastern region etc.

Types of transport plans

Transport plans are prepared for a variety of needs. There is therefore a hierarchy of transport
plans. The plans are part of the overall development plan of a country. The hierarchy may be
represented by the structure below:

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National development Plan

National Transport Plan

Regional Transport Plan

Local Transport Plan

(districts, cities, towns etc.)

The highest level of transport planning is at the national level which considers the economic
development policy of the national plan of a country (5 years plan) and as part of it is to
formulate the national transport plan.

The next hierarchy is the regional transport plan which concerns itself with a region e.g. a
county, a region of common resource comprising a number of districts such as Lake Basin, or a
metropolitan region.

The local plan concerns itself with a small area such as district, city or town.

National Transport Plan

The most important thing to start with when involving a national plan is to first prepare a plan for
the entire country. This is done with the help from the national economic development plan
(NDP), where the broad goals and objectives are laid out. The NDP also fixes the outlays in
various sectors, one most important sector being transport. The transport sector plan is evolved
keeping in view the financial resources allocated to this sector.

Evolving the national transport plan at the national level may have the following limitations:

a) Being part of overall national economic plan, it is not possible to detail out the plan of
various sub-sectors, such as the transport, as clearly as required.
b) The NDP has a short period of 5 years. Since transport needs can be visualized to a
degree of longer time horizon, the short term plan suffer from a limited vision and
perspective.

Transportation plan can be prepared as a 20 year plan. This is particularly possible when
considering the road sector. These 20 year plan have been successful in certain countries where
they have been done and are characterized by the following features:

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i. The plans have classified the road system into functional hierarchy and envisaged the
balanced development of each class.
ii. The plans work out the total length of road network for the country on the basis of certain
accessibility criteria for towns, and villages depending upon the extent of development of
the region.
iii. The plans lay out broad specifications for the various classes of roads.
iv. The plan works out the growth of traffic on roads arising from agricultural, industrial and
mineral development and other trades such as tourism, and make broad provisions to take
care of the road share of traffic.

For the success of such plans, drawbacks need to be minimized as much as possible by the
following:

a) Effort should be made to work out the passenger and freight demands for all modes in the
country for the horizon year (period e.g. 5 year period) and determine the optimal modal
split. Thus the coordinated development of all modes is not lost in the sight of planning.
b) The plans should be based on accurate forecast of traffic. Apart from the total passenger
and freight movement to be catered for, it is also necessary to know where the traffic gets
generated and where the traffic gets attracted.
Generated = at the origins
Attracted = to the destinations
(OD – study)

The passengers and commodity flow network can be evolved only if the zones of generation and
attraction (or origins and destinations) are identified and the quantity of flow between them
known.

The plan should attempt to quantify the economic costs and benefits from various alternatives so
to select the optimum solutions i.e. the program should not be selected arbitrary.

A good transport plan has the following features:

i. It should consider the total passenger and freight movement expected for a future
horizon year. It should be long term in nature.
ii. It should work out fair costs of passengers and freight demands for the whole
transportation system initially and then allocate the same to various modes based on
consideration of energy and resource cost. Thus the plan aim at a coordinated
approach, each mode fulfilling the role it is best fitted to.
iii. The focus should be based on an examination of the past trends, past growth rates and
regression analysis technique based on certain economic indicators. There are
computer programmes (soft-wares) currently available for modeling the demands that
may be used.

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National Level Transport Sector Planning (NLTSP)

i) Elaborating on the policy and objectives within the framework of the national economic
development plan
ii) Fixing a sufficiently long time horizon for plan formulation. A 20 year plan may be
considered adequate.
iii) Dividing the country into suitable zones for predicting the generation and attraction of
traffic.
iv) Prediction of freight and passenger traffic generated at each zone and attracted to each
zone.
v) Distribution of traffic between zones for the future year.
vi) Modal split of future traffic between road, railways, air transport, inland water transport,
coastal shipping, pipelines, etc.
vii) Assignments of traffic on the network of each mode.
viii) Preparing the future network including augmentation of the capacity of present
network and construction of new links within the network.
ix) Evaluation of alternative strategies and selection of the optimal solution for
implementation.
x) Monitoring, evaluation and continuing planning.

The delineation of the country into suitable zones or regions is necessary because the country is
usually vast and has a variety of geographical, climatic, cultural, industrial, demographic and raw
materials availability characteristics.

Transportation needs vary significantly across such heterogeneous characteristics and the
problem of quantification of transport demands can be tackled ideally on a zonal level.

A number of criteria can be used to delineate zones, some of which are:

a) The regions should be homogenous in aspect of one or the other combination of

physical, economic, social and other characteristics.
b) There should be nodality or polarization around a central urban place.
c) There should be administrative coherence

Prediction of traffic can be done in a number of ways. Some of the methods are:

i) Time trend analysis

ii) Regression model
iii) Input output model
iv) Other methods

Time trends analysis is the simplest of the methods. The part traffic demand over a number of
years is collected and a graph is fitted slowly demand against time.

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A suitable curve is the fitted from which the future demand for any year is extrapolated. The
limitation of this method is that it assumes that the same underlying growth process which has
occurred previously will continue as far as into the future as forecasts needed. It does not take
into account possible changes in transportation technologies, travel preferences, transport costs
and pricing policy. Thus, the method is good for short-term forecasting when such changes will
not be significant.

Regression analysis is a technique wherein the travel demand model is developed as function of
certain variables which are known to influence travel. Such variables are called explanatory
variables; e.g. passenger travel demands will depend upon a number of factors such as:

a) Income of the family

b) Car ownership
c) Employment structure of the family
d) Family age, sex and education structure

A simple regression equation for predicting total passenger traffic in a country may be given by:

Log Y = -3540.70 + 588.306logTP

Where: Y = road passenger traffic (in million passenger-km)

TP = total population,

-3540.70 is the model constant and 588.306 is the model parameter, both obtained
through calibration using base year data.

The input-output model is a method of quantifying the relationship that exists in a region
between producing and consuming sectors. An input-output table is constructed in which the
production of each industry is distributed among other industries and the consuming sector of the
economy. From this table, a table of technical coefficient is derived. The technical coefficient is
the amount of input required from an industry to output of a given worth of changes in the output
of another industry. With the help of technological coefficient, changes in the output of one
sector can be studied for resulting changes in the other sectors of interdependence. This is
usually important in determining demand for freights flows (goods), which can be then be used
to determine future freight transport demands.

The next stage in the planning process is to allocate the freight and passenger movement between
zones on the basis of generations and attractions and relative distance between zones or cost of
transport between zones (trip distribution). The modal split then determined by allocating the
transport to various modes. The movement is then assigned to the links (routes) which are then
examined for their accuracy and efficiency. The network is then augmented either by new
facilities or increasing the capacity of existing links. The solutions are then worked out for a

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given set of objectives, and these various solutions are evaluated so that the best system is finally
selected.

Regional Transport Plan

A region is a middle-level area differentiated between the national level and the local level. An
example of a region in Kenya can be a county, a combination of districts or even a district.

It is important that when plans are being prepared, effort must be made to evolve a
comprehensive transport plan involving all modes at the regional level. These plans should be
able to fit within the framework of the national plans.

Local level plans (LLP)

LLPs deal with a small area such as a district, town or a city.

City and town transport plans

Transport problems of urban areas are complex and need special treatment, whether they are for
cities or for medium and small sized towns

Transport plans for big cities are generally formulated according to urban transport planning
process. The various stages involved in this problem are:

i) Survey and analysis of existing conditions

ii) Forecasts and analysis of future conditions and synthesis
iii) Evaluation
iv) Program adoption and implementation
v) Continuing study.

The forecasting and analysis of traffic is accomplished by the following sequential stages of the
classical 4-step model.

1) Trip generation (trip production and attraction)

2) Trip distribution
3) Modal split
4) Trip assignments (route assignment)

Transportation study process entails data collection and the development of formulae or models
enabling future travel demands to be forecast and alternative strategies for handling this demand
to be assessed. This usually consists of complexity dealing with different aspects of travel
demands.

The transport study process as a whole is therefore checked and calibrated before it is used for
the future travel conditions. This is done by developing formulae to synthesize present day

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movement patterns and adjusting them until the present observed conditions. Only when the
formulae have been adjusted or calibrated so that they can adequately predict the present day
travel movements, are they used in true predictive mode to determine future conditions.

The basic stages in the transportation study and modeling process are:

Trip generation (production and attraction trip production)

This entails the determination of the number of person trips or traffic leaving a zone, irrespective
of destination, and the number of trips attracted to zone irrespective of the origin.

Trip distribution

This involves the linking of the trip origins with their destinations (O-D study and modeling).

Modal split

This deals with the separation of trips by mode of transport e.g. separation of trips by private cars
and by public transport.

Trip Assignment

This is the allocation of vehicle trips between any points O and D to the most likely routes; e.g.
for road transport, it is the allocation of trips between O and D to the most likely routes in the
road network (based of factors such as cost or link distances).

REAL OBJECTIVE OF COMPREHENSIVE TRANSPORTATION PLANNING:

The real objective of highway and transportation planning is the movement of people and goods,
not necessarily the movement of vehicles. What the interest of transportation planner is, is to
ensure that people and goods move safely, easily, conveniently, economically, efficiently, etc.
this implies that it does not matter what it takes, whether one mode of transport or the other is
used, so long as this objective is met. People can move by car or public transport; they could
even walk though walking is for shorter distances. For some movements, the car is ideal, for
some the bus or other means or mode of mass transit is preferable.

Comprehensive transport planning is about the optimization of the balance between the use of
these modes. For inter-urban travel, the flexibility of the car is a major advantage. This also
applies to leisure trips in urban areas and other non-work trips since they are spread both in space
and time hence reducing the impact of congested tips.

For the journey to work, public transport is most appropriate. It is therefore important that the
planning ensures that the real objective is achieved, and this is not necessarily the provision of
bigger and better roads to cope up with more and more vehicles. Experience has shown that
providing more facilities such as roads to alleviate the problem of congestion only serve for a

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short time and the problem will recur. Moreover, the cost of such programs is also prohibitive.
Traffic management is one tool used by the planner to ensure that the provision of more
facilities, the objective is still achievable. Use of public transport to reduce the number of
vehicles on the roads of congested cities is a very good solution. Traffic management will also
ensure safety of movement. The interest of all people must be taken care of as a priority. This
will ensure that planning caters for people and goods and not necessarily vehicles. Restrictions
must be put on any vehicles which interfere with this objective.

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