A Comparative Study on Access to Urban Opportunities with Public Transport Systems in 16 African Cities

Rapid urbanization has outpaced the capacity of many African public-transport networks, which remain largely informal, fragmented and under-resourced, limiting residents’ ability to reach essential opportunities such as healthcare, education, recreation, religious facilities and densely populated areas. To quantify these gaps, we analysed 16 cities using a 45-minute public-transport travel-time threshold, integrating GTFS and OpenStreetMap data in Conveyal and deriving complementary design- and operations-based metrics—route length, stop density, median speed and vehicle-kilometres—via a custom Python workflow. The results reveal pronounced disparities: Kampala and Addis Ababa align high population densities with broad accessibility, while Bamako and Freetown exhibit severe shortfalls; cluster and quadrant analyses further expose widespread mismatches between where people live, where services are located and how transit operates, with larger cities frequently offering fewer daily trips per capita. These findings point to systemic inefficiencies in informal networks and make clear that improving urban mobility in Africa will require integrated, data-driven planning, strategic expansion or reconfiguration of routes, and closer coordination between land-use and transport policies to achieve more equitable, sustainable access for all city residents.