“The increase in the use of private motor vehicles for routine travel within the City of Lusaka suggests weakness in the Public Transport (PT) system. The current PT fares are unsustainably high and service levels undesirable. This largely owes to the minimal regulation approach to public transport operations in Zambia. In this research we investigated some of the key features of the PT system in the City of Lusaka, model its trips and analyses its costs. Our analysis is based on a survey of bus services, covering approximately 50 bus routes and over 1,700 passengers. GPS data was also gathered for purposes of modelling trips and charting bus routes. In our analysis we considered aspects of service specifications, current level of service, fuel consumption, revenue, average trip costs, driver expenses, operator expenses and bus revenue allocation. Most of these aspects were found to be far off from the international best practice and international benchmarking. Our research concluded that the PT system for Lusaka fails to sufficiently meet the routine travel requirements of the majority.”
