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Urban transport provides mobility of the people, goods, access to employment, education, shopping, health and entertainment opportunities. Despite this, in many emergent cities of developing countries, the state of road based public transport services does not serve the mobility needs of the population adequately. This is due to inadequate infrastructure and its sub-optimal use, lack of integration between land use and transport planning, traffic congestion, absence of improvement or little improvement in city bus services and related problems. These factors collectively encourage a shift to more personalized modes of travel (Pojani & Stead, 2015).
Passenger overloading on public transport refers to the significant number of people sharing a limited space while using a public transport service (Abkowitz & Tozzi, 1987). Worldwide people invest in quality control programs in order to assess and improve the services provided to the passengers in public transport (Yannis, et al, 2008). However, overloading of passenger in public transport is a serious problem in many countries across the world because it incurs huge costs in terms of life, property and maintenance of vehicles. The importance of controlling overloading passengers cannot be ignored because it helps to reduce deaths and casualties as the findings show that excessive passengers are one of the major causes of many deaths and casualties when accidents occur (Kilavo et al, 2013). The extra passengers who will definitely not have seat belts on are more likely to sustain injuries or even deaths.
According to WHO (2018) global status report on road safety, the number of annual road traffic deaths has reached 1.35 million. Road traffic injuries are now the leading killer of people aged 5-29 years. Ethiopia is one of the worst road traffic accident records in the world. Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia takes the lion’s share of the risk having higher number of vehicles and traffic and the cost of these fatalities and injuries has a great impact on the socio-economic development of the society (Andrew, 2004).