| Important personalities present at the Forum on Urban Mobility, at the CCI Ivato. |
Transport stakeholders yesterday began the Forum on Urban Mobility in Greater Antananarivo. Two days of discussions are planned.
Consultation. Issues in the urban transport sector will be examined on a case-by-case basis over two days. Players in this field have been meeting since yesterday at the Ivato International Conference Center, as part of the first forum on mobility in greater Antananarivo.
Barely into the first day, various observations were made, both from those present and from the authorities, regarding the challenges affecting urban mobility in the capital. “This city was designed for three hundred thousand inhabitants, now we have three million five hundred thousand souls living in Antananarivo. This generates challenges in terms of town planning, energy, but also and above all in terms of transport,” says Valéry Ramonjavelo, Minister of Transport, in his opening speech for these two study days. The heads of the ministerial departments concerned, as well as those in the transport sector, then look into the subject. The objective is to draw up, if only a sketch, what the urban mobility of tomorrow will be.
Pragmatism
Several avenues have been retained, they will be developed during four workshops which will take place today. This involves, among other things, modernizing the city’s taxis. This is what the “Zotra Fitaratra” project proposes, a program to renew the taxi-be fleet, led by the authorities responsible for transport and planning, in collaboration with technical partners, such as the Agency Française de Développement, as well as Codatu. This will make it possible to optimize the profitability of public transport services, on the one hand, and to reduce the pollution generated by buses, for the most part, obsolete, often dating from the last century, on the other hand.
Thinking about the development model of urban mobility in Malagasy cities is also a matter of pragmatism, in relation to local realities. François Durovray, president of Codatu, an international NGO which promotes urban mobility in southern cities, says that there is “a real window of opportunity in Madagascar to develop urban mobility for Malagasy people. We are at an important stage in improving this mobility. However, we must address issues of governance and financing and ensure that there is a real impact of the projects carried out on the population. Antananarivo has its own urban landscape, made up of hills and different neighborhoods below which have their own realities.
Some people take improvised boats to work, school and anywhere, others use buses and so on. Players in the transport sector are therefore considering dealing with these modes of transport, to establish intermodality between means of transport.
Itamara Randriamamonjy