SAFARI

Supporting Sub-Saharan paratransit mobility policies through big data analysis

Safari Njema -“nice trip” in Swahili language- is a pilot interdisciplinary project that proposes an innovative methodology to study and reduce “transport poverty”, supporting bottom-up and ordinary practices through the use of big data. The project is managed by a highly interdisciplinary team, composed by scholars and researchers in the field of mathematics and statistics, urban studies, policy design and co-design, informational engineering and management engineering. The researchers collaborate on a permanent basis under the Data@ter transdisciplinary nucleum at Politecnico di Milano.

Avenida Samuel Magaia, Maputo

“Due to transport poverty, many residents cannot afford to travel to the city centers or to areas where businesses and institutions are located, depriving them of the full benefits offered by urbanization” (UN-HABITAT – Urban Mobility, 2019)

“Paratransit-type services are provided without official sanction.” (R. Cervero, A. Golub, Informal Transport: A global perspective)

Avenida Samuel Magaia, Maputo

SAFARI's objectives

Studying paratransit mobility
Building a model that integrates GPS data
Offering insights to improve policy making
Constructing performance indicators
Experimenting with data visualisation