The African Transport Systems Database - a geospatial database of multi-modal connected networks

We present the first comprehensive geolocated multi-modal transport database for the whole continent of Africa, the African Transport Systems Database (AfTS-Db), including road, rail, aviation, maritime and inland waterway networks. To do so, we created and standardized asset and network data across all transport modes, including inter-modal connections, attributes of road and rail corridors and estimated annual statistics for airports and ports. The African Transport Systems Database includes 234 airports including their airline routes, 179 maritime ports and their connections with each other, 132 inland ports and docking sites with river and lake connections,  4,412 railway stations connected across 99,373 kilometers of rail lines, and 1,004,512 kilometers of roads mainly comprised of all motorways, trunk roads, primary and secondary routes across Africa and some local roads that connect to other transport modes. The AfTS-Db provides key information for transport planning, resilience assessments, asset management and development of transport models and applications. Furthermore, we expect the data will also be of relevance for environmental, health, social and economic studies.

本研究构建了首个覆盖非洲全大陆的综合地理定位多模态交通数据库——非洲交通系统数据库（African Transport Systems Database，AfTS-Db），涵盖公路、铁路、航空、海运及内河航道网络。为此，我们针对各类交通方式构建并标准化了资产与网络数据，包括多式联运衔接节点、公路及铁路走廊属性，以及机场与港口的估算年度统计数据。
该数据库包含234座机场及其运营航线、179个海运港口及港口间的衔接网络、132座内河港口与停靠站点及对应的河湖连通通道；另有99373公里铁路线路串联起4412座火车站，以及1004512公里公路网络，主要涵盖非洲全境的高速公路、干线公路、主次干道，以及衔接其他交通方式的地方道路。
该数据库可为交通规划、韧性评估、资产管理以及交通模型与应用开发提供核心支撑信息。此外，本数据集还可应用于环境、健康、社会及经济相关研究领域。