Descriptive overviews of this data including population, employment opportunities, and income distributions are shown in Appendix A – Detailed Data Description.

Rio de Janeiro is the second largest city in Brazil, with more than 6 million inhabitants and the second largest GDP (IBGE, 2021a, 2021b). However, despite being relatively prosperous, it is characterized by high levels of inequality and large fragmentation (Ferreyra & Roberts, 2018), the latter being attributed to both morphological and geographic constraints (Ricky Burdett et al., 2013) as well as historical policies (Lago, 2015). Economic activity in Rio is heavily concentrated in the historic city center (Centro), with slightly lower levels of employment in directly adjacent areas and much lower levels across the rest of the city. This is contrasted with the population distribution across the city, which is relatively dense globally and extends across the municipal area with decreasing density as the city extends westward. The wealthiest residents are concentrated in low-density areas along the Southern coastline. Income tends to decrease the further North and West away from Centro, with the poorest residents generally living in the furthest North or Western parts of the city, except in the cases of some favelas with high concentrations of extremely poor residents in small areas of otherwise higher income regions.

Socio-economic data for Kinshasa was sourced from a Commuter Travel Survey conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in 2018, as part of ongoing work towards the Kinshasa Transport Master Plan (JICA, 2019). The survey was conducted for Traffic Area Zones (TAZ) and extended across the functional labor market of Kinshasa. However, the survey does not cover the full extent of Kinshasa’s provincial boundaries. In addition, population data from WorldPop<sup>8</sup> was also used to complement the survey data and provide more detailed population information.

Kinshasa is the capital and economic center of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with a population in excess of 14 million (World Bank, 2019) and population growth rate of 5.1% per annum. It is expected to become the most populous megacity in Africa by 2030 (World Bank, 2018). Similarly to Rio, economic activity is concentrated in a small area, in Gombe, with some hyper-localized areas in Ndjili and Matete. However, despite Rio’s relatively high density, the population of Kinshasa lives in an even more compact area with very high densities located relatively close to most economic activity. There are also smaller, slightly fragmented communities located further North-East along the river. The legacy of colonial spatial planning followed by extremely high rates of urbanization with insufficient investment in infrastructure have resulted in a few concentrated affluent areas (such as Gombe/Socimat and Mont Ngafula) and a high incidence of poverty (approximately 60% in 2012 (World Bank, 2018)), with large slums across much of the remainder of the city and many residents being unable to afford transport services (Beeckmans & Bigon, 2016). The lower earning residents are concentrated in Selembao and the Eastern edge of the city proper (Ndjili, Kisenso and Masina) with poorer residents also located along the Northeastern corridor towards Bombala.

In this study, all socio-economic data was aggregated to a hexagonal grid using Uber’s H3 grid system (Brodsky, 2018). Each hexagon has a diagonal of approximately 900 meters and a total area of 0.7 km<sup>2</sup> .

# 2.1.3 Operational costs and fare structure

In order to assess the impact of a fuel price increase on the fares of different transport services, we investigate existing operational costs, fare structures and mechanisms for increasing fares in each city.

> 8 Available at https://www.worldpop.org/.

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