Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
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The problem is being efficient or effective or sustainable are not visions at all but conditions,
which all processes are evaluated. Such statements offer no direction that can be clearly
identified and results that can be simply measured. Such statements are ambiguous. Efficiency,
Efficacy Sustainability have become clichés, they are not goals, but the conditions needed to
achieve them. This partly explains why policies and plans, while providing a shopping list of
investment projects and measures that investors can pick off, fall short on delivering the results
expected. A goal for the transport sector might be “Access will be provided to free public
transport for 90% of the urban population within 15 minutes walking distance” Such a vision
may seem ambitious and even improbable, but is it? In education nobody doubts that education
should be free at the point of delivery and be accessible to 100%of the population. Also in health,
that a vision would be a similar one to education of 100% access to free health services. So why
not public transport? The socio-economic arguments are identical, that it is not only good for
society to be well educated and healthy, but also mobile. The point about this discourse is that
transport sector goals must be concrete.
Meetings held with the leading transport institutions in Uganda, with the MoWT, the Uganda
Road Authority, the Ugandan Road Fund, the Uganda Railways Corporation, the Civil Aviation
Authority, and the Kampala City Council Authority, provided insight to the management of the
transport sector in Uganda. The extent to which a decision making on transport infrastructure
investment is influenced by transport policy was considered to be significant. The curious aspect
to this response is the current absence of a formal transport policy. The reason for this situation
is the belief that a transport policy exists and a recollection of having actually read it. There was
a draft transport policy of 2014, but it was never finalized and a new attempt is being made in
2018 (World Bank, 2017). Another reason is that the NTMP is considered to be both a policy and
planning document and to some extent it has fulfilled the role of policy and planning document.
The reform in the management of the transport sector between 2008 and the current time can
be largely traced to the objectives of the NTMP, which are shown i Certainly the list
reads more like policy statements than transport planning objectives.
Table 11: 2008 Transport Sector Objectives from the National Transport Master Plan
1 Policy Objective
1.1 Contribute, through transport services, to an increase in trade, employment and
economic output, and a reduction in poverty;
1.2 Improve access to public services, markets, and employment, through improvement and
maintenance of rural and urban transport infrastructure;
1.3 Ensure good customer choice by promoting provision of efficient intermodal interchange
facilities;
1.4 Promote private sector operation of transport services, and encourage private sector
investment in infrastructure;
1.5 Promote equitable treatment of different transport modes, allowing efficiency and modal
suitability to determine modal split;
1.6 Promote modal integration, including container transhipment facilities at interchange
points between all modes, including those with the proposed Eldoret-Kampala Pipeline
and ‘road bridges’ across waterways;
1.7 Ensure safety of transport networks and operations;