A Review of Traffic Congestion in Dar es Salaam City from the Physical Planning Perspective

Traffic congestion is one of the major problems facing Dar es Salaam City and is attributed by a number of factors including rapid population increase, inadequate and poor road infrastructure, city structure, rapid increase in number of cars and lack of physical plan to control city development. The city is already implementing a number of strategies in order to minimize traffic congestion. However, many of the strategies are focusing on improving the capacity of roads in terms of increasing number of lanes, proposing new overpasses and underpasses at the main road intersections and improving public transport. These strategies cannot fully overcome the congestion problems in Dar es Salaam on their own unless efforts are made to redistribute services and community infrastructure. The latter can be achieved through physical planning, which has the potential of influencing trip generation and travel patterns and traffic volume in specific roads. Therefore to minimize traffic congestion in the Dar es Salaam both strategies for improving road capacity, public transport and physical planning solutions ought to be applied together.