Improvement of Kigali city bus services in terms of bus routes and bus stops

Abstract

Public transport is the best way of providing mobility to people who do not have access to private cars, or to provide the alternative option to private car mobility. The main transport system used for Rwanda is bus transport. Today, public transport is adopted for many purposes such as providing mass mobility, reducing energy consumption and hence protecting the environment, and creation of job opportunities. As the bus transport system is very important on these points of views, the critical issue remains whether the bus transport services are adequately provided to satisfy the demand. The City of Kigali has been rapidly growing in terms of population and the infrastructure and services provided have been overtaken by this rapid growth of the population. In this research, a thorough analysis of bus services provided to the City resident was made and particular attention paid to the adequacy of bus routes and stops services. The bus transport is useful to the people using it if it is accessible and attractive. The aim of this research is to get information data on public transport in terms of bus routes and bus stops, to assess if the bus routes and bus stops are well designed to provide the optimum services to users and then to propose the improvements that have to be made to the current situation. The primary method used for this research is the interview through questionnaires that were distributed to a sample of the population of the City of Kigali. The decision – makers in the City of Kigali public transport were also interviewed to compare their views of the provided bus services with these of the general public and to know if there are some planned improvement to the service. The results indicated that the bus services provided in the City of Kigali do not satisfy the users. Bus routes are not sufficient to serve all the City of Kigali residents adequately and the bus stops services do not meet the users’ needs. The views of the population are similar to these of decision – makers considering the bus routes, but somehow different when we consider the bus stops services. Finally, the research proposes the guidance on improvements to be made to the bus services in the City of Kigali on bus routes and bus stops by the year 2018, and advocate different subject to be tackled in further researches, with respect to the improvement of the City of Kigali bus services.