Welcome, Wamkelekile, Welkom to ATRC 2024!
From the Local Organising Committee:
Dear colleagues,
It is my great honour to welcome you to the inaugural African Transport Research Conference (ATRC) in the beautiful city of Cape Town on behalf of the entire ATRC2024 organising committee. The ATRC is co-organised by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) and the University of Cape Town Centre for Transport Studies.
The ATRC hopes to follow in the footsteps of several established continental transport research conferences, including the Pan American Congress on Transport And Logistics (PANAMSTR), organised 22 times, the conference of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies (EASTS), organised 15 times, the Australasian Transport Research Forum (ATRF), organised 44 time, the European Transport Conference (ETC), organised 52 times, and – of course – the Transportation Research Board (TRB), which recently celebrated its centennial conference!
The ATRC aspires to become the ‘go to’ conference for researchers interested in African transport, attended by the best researchers from across the continent and the world, and hosted by its own members each time in a different country. The ATRC wants to break barriers between researchers from different countries and different transport disciplines. The ATRC will also provide an exclusive forum discussing African transport, instead of being just a parallel session in a programme.
I am delighted to see that the interest in the conference has been phenomenal and to say that this event has already exceeded all our expectations before it even starts. We received more extended abstracts than we could ever imagine and had to close registrations as we reached capacity of the venue. This in itself is of course not nice, but makes it a success, nonetheless. At the time of writing this, the number of registered delegates stands close to 200, of whom 150 are from Africa. Together they represent 28 different countries! The VREF generously sponsored 90 delegates with full- or partial-funding. Thank you very much.
A key aim of the ATRC is to provide an academic forum to discuss transport issues on the African continent. While the current focus is largely on passenger transport on the continent, I can foresee that we will grow in several other areas, including maritime and freight transport. Another key aim of the ATRC is to build a strong research and researcher community in Africa, following the great work of our co-organiser VREF in their Mobility and Access in African Cities (MAC) program. Similar to the other continental transport research conferences we have also launched an academic journal African Transport Studies (AfTRAN) with Elsevier, which will provide the platform for our community to grow research excellence and visibility of the research work done. We will also be announcing a collaboration with the African Transport Research Alliance (ATRA) as they have established a team of African diaspora with keen interest in African transport research. Together ATRA and AfTRAN will provide a global platform for engagement, discussion and exchange on African transport research in between the ATRC conferences. We have already witnessed this community feeling when many of you, without complaint, took on the daunting task of reviewing extended-abstracts and full papers.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to our sponsors SANRAL, United Nations, GIZ, HVT, Elsevier, GTS Consult, GoMetro and PTV Group for linking your name to this inaugural conference; to VREF and SAICE for sponsoring the best paper and best paper by an author under 35 award; to the V&A Waterfront, the City of Cape Town, LOOP, PTV Group and the Traffic Management Centre (TMC) for facilitating the technical tours and training. Without your support we would not have been able to organise this.
A big welcome to all delegates. Together we will make this a successful conference!
Mark Zuidgeest
(SANRAL Chair of Transport Planning and Engineering at the University of Cape Town)
Chair of the ATRC2024 organizing committee
From the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations:
Dear Colleagues,
On behalf of the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF for short), I am very pleased and proud to welcome all of you to the first-ever African Transport Research Conference 2024. This conference is a landmark event in several ways. It is the largest convening to date of scholars working on issues related to African transport, mobility and access, and the conference also arguably gathers a uniquely diverse scientific community of scholars to present and discuss their work in this broad area. I am sure that we all are looking forward to three exciting days of dynamic knowledge exchanges!
For VREF, the conference marks the sixth year for our program “Mobility and Access in African Cities” (MAC) which was started in 2019. The overall purpose of this program is to increase the capacity for research and education in broad areas related to urban mobility and access in Africa. A guiding principle for our work is to provide resources that will enable specifically researchers based at African universities to take the lead in research and deliver new, locally situated and cross-disciplinary knowledge that can contribute to achieving sustainable mobility and equitable access in African urban areas. The MAC program also seeks to help form a new generation of highly skilled Sub-Saharan university researchers and teachers, as well as to engage with practitioners, policy makers and actors within civil society who can support processes of change on the continent.
We like to think of VREF as a supportive partner in the important work of our African colleagues in carrying out high-quality research, often in multidisciplinary teams, that leads to new knowledge, approaches and perspectives. In this context the African Transport Research Conference promises to be an excellent forum for presenting, exchanging and discussing innovative ideas and results within the African transport community.
We would like to thank, first and foremost, the ATRC2024 organizing committee at the University of Cape Town for their exceptional commitment, creativity and hard work in making this conference happen and putting together such an exciting program. As co-organizers, we also add our warm thanks to the many others who have made important contributions which - although sometimes invisible – have been crucial to successfully planning and launching the conference. Finally, we also thank all presenters, session chairs and other delegates for their engaged participation and contributions.
Welcome - and let the dialogues begin!
Henrik Nolmark
Director of the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations
