Dar es Salaam is one of numerous large cities in the developing countries facing
tremendous development challenges: growing population, rapid urbanization and
motorization, sprawled informal settlements, problematic informal transit operations, and
poor and unequal infrastructure service. One major problem Dar faces in overcoming its
mobility challenges is lack of quality data. This thesis capitalizes upon a unique
opportunity to demonstrate the potential value that mobile telephony presents for
transportation planning purposes in Dar and other cities of the Global South. Based on
the smartphone-based travel survey data collected by the World Bank from 581 Dar
residents for a 4-week period in November-December 2015, this thesis identifies travel
patterns depicted by the data, analyzes the representativeness of participants, and
demonstrates how the data can be used to help evaluate travel equity in the city. Although
the pilot implementation reveals several technical and social challenges in adopting this
data collection technology in the African context, it demonstrates promising opportunities
in such technology. First, the high-resolution data suggest more precise representation of
travel behaviors, compared to traditional paper-based surveys; the smartphone-based
survey records higher trip rates, more work-related and private leisure trip-making, and
more short-distance travel. Second, little observable bias exists in the likelihood of
participation among different socio-demographic groups; except for people with fewer
education years and who work for government, no significantly lower likelihood of
participation is found among other socio-demographic attributes. Third, the richness of
smartphone-based data makes it possible to operationalize new ways to systematically
evaluate travel equity in the African city. The ellipse-measured monthly activity space
and network-based daily activity space both suggest high travel inequity among
participants in Dar. However, although accessibility is unequal (equality of welfare), it is
the differences in willingness and ability to pay, rather than the differences in returns on
travel welfare investment (equality of effectiveness), that lead to high inequity of travel
welfare. Overall, this thesis can help guide future mobility technology-based data
collection methods and facilitate the development of evidence-based smart and
sustainable planning decisions for Dar and other rapidly developing regions.