Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
86
Testing the adequacy of the paved road network
The methodology used herein is based on the work done by (Queiroz and Gautam, 1992) who
showed there to be a significant relationship between per capita GDP and road network density
as given as:
PGNP = 1.39 x LPR
Where PGNP is the Per Capita GNP and LPR is the length of paved roads per 1million population.
The relationship had a correlation coefficient of 0.76 for a sample of 98 countries, of varied
development status, an additional 1 km of paved road network per 1 million population added
USD1.39 to per capita GDP. For countries with undeveloped road networks the value will be
higher than 1.39 and for developed networks it will be lower – such that there appeared to be
diminishing returns for road network enhancement in more economically developed countries.
Railways
The Uganda rail network is shown i According to the URC, the track work is single
line metre gauge and formed part of the East African Railways that linked the Port of Mombasa
to its hinterland. Construction started in 1896 and the last sections completed in 1929. The
length of passing loops on a single line railway determine the maximum train length and
together with the ruling gradient, determine its capacity. In the case of the Ugandan Kenyan
Railway the maximum train length was 30 wagons, so the maximum train load would be 1,200
tons. The maximum operation network was 1,260 km but by 2009 it had diminished to just 320
km. Attempting to reverse the declining role of railways, the entire Kenyan / Ugandan system
was placed under a concession agreement with the Rift Valley Railway Companyi, but after 10
years of struggling the experiment failed and the railways reverted to public ownership. The
lack of demand for East African railways is structural because there has been investment in
roads but hardly any in rail, but recently this is changing.
As part of a joint agreement between the East African Community, the Government of Uganda is
in the process of developing a standard gauge railway (1,485 mm) on the routes between the
port of Mombasa to Kampala, Kasese, Kigali (Rwanda), and Kisangani (DRC). It will also link
Tororo to Gulu, Nimule, Juba, and Djibouti. The new line is designed to take double stacked
container and a 40 x 100 ton wagon train length.
This means that capacity increases from 1,200 tons to 4,000 tons per train. Although SGR has
the potential to generate demand because of lower unit costs, the traffic forecasts are likely to
prove optimistic partly because the limited traffic is also claimed by parallel tolled expressway
projects in their feasibility studies. Furthermore, SGR costing is not intended to recover CAPEX
at all but only the avoidable costs. This makes the entire project highly subsidized.