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Sustainable Cities
Urban Acet
Established as a collaborative research centre in 2008, the
African Centre of Excellence for Studies in Public and Non-
motorised Transport (ACET) is funded by the Volvo Research
and Educational Foundations (VREF) under its Future Urban
Transport programme.
I
t is part of an international network of ten VREF-funded centres all focusing
on the development and implementation of future urban transport solutions.
ACET comprises academics and postgraduate research students from three main
partner universities: the Centre for Transport Studies at UCT, the Department of
Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Dar es Salaam,
and the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi. This Centre
of Excellence is the primary collaborative network for the university’s Centre for
Transport Studies.
The ACET research programme is focused on the two main areas of public transport and
paratransit, and non-motorised transport. Paratransit is defined as an alternative, flexible
mode of passenger transportation that does not follow fixed routes or schedules (such as
the minibus taxis that dominate the Cape Town public-transportation scene).
African cities have experienced a decline in scheduled public transport, and the
emergence of weakly regulated and unscheduled paratransit. A major challenge facing
authorities is the transformation of these services into integrated, regulated, safer and
more efficient systems. Many previous attempts to do this have been developed without
sufficiently grounded knowledge of ‘real world’ business, operating and regulatory
conditions, and of governance capacities.
African cities, fairly ubiquitously, have inadequate infrastructure to support the non-
motorised transport (NMT) modes upon which large impoverished populations depend.
Poor levels of NMT accessibility and unsafe and uncomfortable travel conditions are
the inevitable results. For many decades NMT has been ignored or underestimated, and
treated as an add-on or afterthought. Both these research areas are situated in a context
of responsible government agencies with low capacities, limited resources and poorly
developed planning frameworks.
The spectrum of the ACET research programme includes projects focused on travel
behaviour patterns, road safety, paratransit operations and regulation, public transport
system assessment, non-motorised travel and infrastructure, intelligent transport
systems, travel behaviour change, school travel planning, and city restructuring.
ACET’s objective is to produce and disseminate knowledge on the development and
governance of public and non-motorised transport in African cities, and to serve as a hub
of research and capacity-building. The Centre of Excellence aims to empower researchers
in Africa to set their own research agendas and engage directly with the transport
challenges they face. An overarching objective is to facilitate an increase in journal
publication, and greater involvement of African researchers in international conferences
and in other forms of scholar interaction.
Associate Professor Roger
Behrens