After three layovers, five airports and over 35 hours of travel, we (me, a first year med student named Elliot, a soon to be first year MPH Nisha, and undecided U of U sophomore Michelle) emerged from Kilimanjaro airport and into the arms of our loving country directors Tyler and America (yep, that’s her name!). They grabbed our bags and threw them into what at that time I assumed was the team van. It had four rows of seats, was very rickety, had no interior lining, and the door was so rusted through in parts that you could see outside.
Two police stops, as many bribes, and one clever maneuver later, we were home and I had survived my first dala dala ride. Dala dala’s serve as Tanzania’s privately owned and operated mass transit system (and for enough money, as our private transport to the airport) They are only licensed to travel between certain towns and have a stripe indicating their route along the side (which explains the two police stops for our out-of-line dala dala on the way home from the airport). They normally have a driver, a hustler (more on him later), and as many rows of seats as fit in the van. Each is painted and stickered up according the tastes of the driver (I can’t tell yet if any have ads on them – a lucrative market perhaps?) Fares are set at certain prices for specific distances but other than their areas of operation and the fare they charge, they operate completely unregulated (and it is questionable how often the other two are regulated anyway)
Dala Dal’s wait at the starting point of their route with the driver in the car while the hustler walks around banging the side of the van and yelling out the final destination. Since there are normally a couple Dala Dalas sitting around, they are competing against the other hustlers for your business and pursue you somewhat aggressively, to the point of grabbing your arm and pulling you toward their van if you aren’t assertive. You want to pick your van wisely, because if it’s empty, it won’t leave until they’ve gathered enough people to more than fill it. So you’re best off in a van that’s almost full because that means it’s almost ready to go. And when I say full, I mean full. You’re usually packed four people to a row, and if they can get enough to have people standing in the van, they’ll pack them in. The most I’ve had in a van with me so far was twenty five. On the way home from church last week we even had a sheep under a seat.
Once filled, the Dala dala literally takes off. The driver’s profits depend on how many paying customers he gets from point A-B so he’ll try and pick up as many as possible and get them in and out as fast as possible. If someone in front is moving too slow, they pass them – no matter how fast the car in the other lane is coming. If the van isn’t full enough the hustler will have the van pull over and open and hop out the door while still on the move to try and round up some more customers. When you’re ready to get off you just bang on the roof and they pull over. After disentangling yourself and squeezing out you can hit dry ground happy in the knowledge that you survived another brush with death.
This system isn’t very comfortable. I’m positive that it’s dangerous (and exhilarating. PS mom – no calling the office about this one). And yet it works – almost perfectly actually. In an area in which the government can hardly pay for hospitals, schools, or other basic necessities, their exists a system of mass transit that rivals in efficiency any system in western world. There is hardly any wait time – a dala dala passes nearly every thirty seconds – and for a pittance (the price of a ride to town is 300 Tanzanian Shillings, or about 20 cents) you can get anywhere you need to go. It’s a miracle of supply, demand and the invisible hand. After solving (somewhat) the issue of mass transport, it begs the question, if properly incentivized, what other ills can the market cure? How could the market fix the roads, sewage, or....
No comments:
Post a Comment