Formal transport, informal transport in Abidjan: from local knowledge to the map

How can sustainable and accessible transport infrastructure be planned and built when much of the travel is undertaken by artisanal transport?

This question is being asked by the Ivory Coast’s Ministry of Transport as it plans several large-scale projects as part of its Abidjan Urban Mobility Plan.

Cet article existe également en Français

With the financial and technical support of AFD (French Development Agency), the Ministry has therefore launched a project to map formal and informal transport in the Abidjan district.

The goal that is now reached is to produce a digital copy of the transport network, as high quality and up-to-date, in order to better guide public action.


image by nlehuby / CC BY-SA (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gbaka_à_Abidjan.png)
The gbakas, minibuses providing an informal inter-communal transport service in the Greater Abidjan territory.

The Systra and Jungle Bus companies have responded to this call in 2019 and produced the Abidjan transport data: it is now available to all on DigitalTransport4Africa resource center .

In line with DigitalTransport4Africa previous projects, the project has adopted a strategy to contribute to digital commons. The challenge is to ensure that the production of transport supply data is a digital foundation of shared knowledge that benefits to everyone, both public authorities and third parties (universities, companies and citizens) willing to add value and solve mobility issues.
Therefore, all the produced data is available under a free license and the project team has developed and contributed to several open source reusable tools.

First and foremost, the project chose OpenStreetMap (OSM), the Wikipedia of maps.
This collaborative mapping project from around the world allows everyone to participate and create geographic data of their own neighborhood. It is today the largest geographic database under open license and in many countries it is even the most complete map that exists. It brings together the contributions of a diverse community, from committed citizens to businesses and universities to local authorities and international organizations.

With the support of the OpenStreetMap Côte d’Ivoire association, which promotes the project in this country, all transport data has been created in OpenStreetMap.


In November 2019, OpenStreetMap Côte d’Ivoire hosted on its territory the State of the Map Africa, an event that brought together contributors from the whole African continent for several days of exchange and sharing. The Abidjan mapping project and more generally the use of OpenStreetMap for public transport were at the heart of the discussions.

A collaborative project

The first stage of the project was to make a diagnosis of the transport lines to be surveyed. For the inhabitants of the district of Abidjan, 80% of trips are operated by informal transport. However, by definition, poor information exists for these networks. This is why lines identification has been carried out in collaboration with the local authorities: on the basis of the information already in their possession, the team travelled to the various bus stations and connection areas in order to complete the list of the lines that stopped there and their destinations.

OpenStreetMap contributors from each municipality of Greater Abidjan were mobilized for this task in order to bring their local knowledge and their experience of these informal transport networks; they then have been trained to carry out detailed field surveys. More than 10 people were autonomous in order to carry out a full collection of the transport network but also to collect schedules, surveying at the major transport hubs of the district.

first day of survey, in Abidjan
First day of field surveys for the team, Gare Sud (Abidjan)

Equipped with a smartphone on which was installed a mobile application specific to the project, these collectors then surveyed both land and lagoon transport networks.

The next step was to model the transport network in OpenStreetMap from this very large amount of raw data. The creation of this digital twin requires serious consideration of the method of data creation in order to structure the information and make it easily re-usable: specific tools have been developed to achieve this goal (see below in this article) and a specific methodology was created based on the experience of OpenStreetMap contributors involved in the project.

The level of quality is ambitious: the data produced must be able to be used as much for studying the network, in order to change public transport policies, as for the use of passenger information. On the basis of the data, a schematic transport map was indeed created by the company Latitude Cartagène as well as several prototypes of mobile application for calculating the route.

schematic map of Abidjan transport

Reusable digital tools

The project documentation, also under a free license, as well as the training materials carried out in Abidjan will allow you to find out more. In addition, you could freely use these guides, tools and methodology to adapt on your own territory.

In addition, all the technical tools used and created for the project are available under an open license, and can be used for other mapping projects. The team’s expertise in both public transport and OpenStreetMap has enabled the development of specific tools that are perfectly adapted to the needs of the contributors.

Here is a small pick:

OSMTracker and its transport layout
-> A mobile app for collecting information on board: location and name of stops, track and shape of the route, observed speeds, vehicle filling, etc.

A specific arrangement of buttons was created as part of the project to make the collection of vehicle fill levels very fast and efficient.

Busy Hours
-> a tool for modifying the frequency of vehicle’s passing on the route in OpenStreetMap


Hours of service, as well as off-peak and peak hour frequencies can be easily entered for each route or sub-route.

The tool’s simplified interface speeds up the creation of frequency data for transport routes.

osm2gtfs
-> a script to transform OpenStreetMap data to GTFS format, the international exchange standard for route planners and mobility planning tools.


OpenStreetMap and the GTFS format are two complementary building blocks for creating and distributing open transport data. See our infographic to compare different data creation approaches

Some other technical tools have also been developed to facilitate the work of data entry and quality control in OpenStreetMap in order to create accurate and usable data.

The project in Abidjan once again confirms the relevance of digital commons and OpenStreetMap to efficiently map transportation networks.

Indeed, this rich ecosystem facilitates collaboration between local communities, funders such as the French Development Agency (AFD), local authorities and mobility experts, for the benefit of all.

In 2021, various projects are in progress to create a better passenger’s information based on these data. Jungle Bus and OSM-CI are running additional campaigns to update the data to better model the evolution of the network.

More information about this project is available on http://sites.digitaltransport.io/abidjantransport

OpenStreetMap and GTFS to map your transit network

Most of the cities in the world don’t have any transit map. Therefore there is more and more of them launching a mapping project of their network.

Where to begin?

Public transport mapping stakeholders all have a specific approach. How would you compare them? Which one is the best?

We identified two data creation methodologies that you could discover here:

🇫🇷 Cette infographie existe également en français
🇪🇸 Esta infografía también está disponible en español
🇩🇪 Diese Infografik gibt es auch in deutscher Sprache


OSM then GTFS: Jungle Bus’s choice

Discover why the “OSM then GTFS” approach seduced us.
We would like to help you to use this methodology for your project.

Map in OpenStreetMap then produce a GTFS : the best choice to stimulate collaboration around more sustainable data

To map a transit network, it’s great to co-create data in collaboration with the OpenStreetMap community. It’s also essential to rely on the GTFS standard.

With no doubts, our choice is to map the transit networks in collaboration with the OpenStreetMap local communities. GTFS conversion happens a posteriori.

However it is also possible to it backward. You can compare the two approaches in our detailled infographic.

Trust the OpenStreetMap community

At Jungle Bus, when we focus on a specific city, we start as soon as possible the collaboration with the local OpenStreetMap community members. It’s not only because we are involved OpenStreetMap contributors!

Their knowledge of the field and the context are indeed valuable assets to take into account local specificities and build data that fits to the reality. It is all the more necessary that the cartography of the transports exceeds in general the simple framework of the GTFS: the position and the classification of the roads where the buses circulate, the pedestrian paths to reach the stops or the available equipments are as much of useful information. OpenStreetMap also allows you to contribute all this data: the contributors have already started this meticulous task.

This undoubtedly increases the quality of the data produced and allows local appropriation: contributors “feel responsible” for the data of their own city and invest more time, for example by using the free Android Jungle Bus application (description in French but app available in English and more languages). This leads to more regular updates and better quality.

Durability and sharing

The 320 local transport local lines, tro-tro, have been mapped by the local community during summer 2017 with Jungle Bus support to create a transport map and a GTFS file. You can read more about the project in our dedicated article (in French).

More than 2 years later, the local community has maintained the data, in collaboration with a local start-up! This “natural” appropriation can only take place if it is planned upstream, accompanied during the initial mapping project and OpenStreetMap is particularly well suited to it.

By entering transport data directly into OpenStreetMap, the data is opened from the first day: all stakeholders can discover and use the data as they are created. Beyond the storage and distribution, OpenStreetMap offers a true collaboration platform where the different people involved in the project can share the tasks of creation and verification of the data.

The OpenStreetMap data, in addition of being updated by the local community, is much more shared and used than a simple GTFS open data file.

The OpenStreetMap community is already structured both locally and globally: it has means of communication, documentation and collaborative sharing, etc. These tools are used daily by thousands of contributors and reusers every day.

Easier use of the data

By first relying on OpenStreetMap, the data is standardized between the different networks and dedicated tools are available in Free Software.

In particular, we can mention osm-transit-extractor which allows specific exports for transport, or osm2gtfs to export data directly to GTFS format (stops, line layout and schedules included).

Jungle Bus uses and contributes to both tools. Indeed, for several years, we have been participating in the improvement of OpenStreetMap community tools and creating missing bricks to work on public transport; all our tools are under free license and usable by all.

Do you have a project to map a transport network? We can help you implement an innovative co-authoring methodology in your project to make your data more resilient.