Dar es Salaam — A confrontation between Dar es Salaam authorities and truck owners over lorries parked on service roads has brought the city’s freight-infrastructure deficit into sharp focus, as officials move to clear road reserves and hauliers demand designated alternatives.
On August 17, Dar es Salaam regional commissioner Albert Chalamila directed police to work with the Tanzania National Roads Agency (TANROADS) to arrest drivers whose trucks are parked in road reserves.
The order was issued during an inspection of an earlier directive to remove lorries from the roadside, with the regional administration saying the aim is to ease congestion and restore access for other road users.
Under section 29 of the Roads Act, a road reserve is set aside exclusively for road development, expansion and related activities, unless a road authority grants written, temporary permission that does not compromise those purposes.
But enforcement has met an unusually direct warning from the Tanzania Truck Owners Association (TATOA). On August 18, its chairperson, Elis Lukumay, said owners were prepared to halt operations if action against drivers continued without consultation.
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“We are ready to park the trucks; let us talk,” Lukumay said during a press conference, arguing that the association does not oppose parking rules but rejects what it calls punitive enforcement without a jointly agreed solution.
Lukumay has also complained about the removal of registration plates from drivers and has called for a solution developed through engagement with the industry, rather than enforcement alone.
The dispute matters because the roads around Dar es Salaam are not carrying ordinary urban traffic alone. The Tanzania Ports Authority describes Dar port as the country’s principal maritime gateway, handling about 95 per cent of Tanzania’s international trade and serving seven landlocked neighbours, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Rwanda and Burundi.
Freight demand is rising alongside efforts to make the port more competitive. DP World handled 44,001 twenty-foot equivalent units at Terminal 1 in May, 57 per cent more than a year earlier, while TPA Director General Plasduce Mbossa said growth must be matched by faster clearance, reliable evacuation and stronger inland connections.
That is the central contradiction exposed by the standoff: authorities have a responsibility to keep roads safe and passable, but a logistics city also needs space for trucks to queue, stage, rest and transfer cargo lawfully.
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Clearing service roads without a working alternative may move the problem; allowing them to become informal lorry parks shifts congestion, safety and maintenance costs onto the public road network.
The Government has started to build an alternative freight architecture. The Kwala Inland Dry Port, launched in 2025 and linked to the Standard Gauge Railway and Morogoro highway, was designed to decongest the Dar port and city, with structured parking being developed as throughput expands.
However, TPA’s own dry-port information lists Kwala’s first phase as ongoing and says its future expansion is intended to decongest Dar es Salaam. That makes it a promising long-term response, but not conclusive evidence that sufficient, accessible truck parking is already available for the current enforcement drive.
The episode also speaks to Dar’s wider ambition to become a major, globally connected city. The World Bank says Dar is Tanzania’s largest urban agglomeration, home to a strategically located port and accounting for about 17 per cent of national GDP, yet it remains marked by unplanned expansion, weak connectivity and fragmented authority across its local governments and sector agencies.
There has been real investment: the first phase of the Dar es Salaam Metropolitan Development Project built 207.8 kilometres of roads and improved mobility for 4.1 million people, while its second phase seeks to strengthen urban services, institutions and climate resilience. But a city aspiring to a sustainable megacity must plan freight movement as carefully as passenger traffic, housing and drainage.
For now, Chalamila’s order and TATOA’s threat underline an immediate need for a negotiated transition: enforce the road reserve, publish where trucks can legally park, and connect port, rail, dry-port, road and municipal plans.
The alternative, Mr Lukumay told reporters, is a cycle in which a logistics bottleneck is treated as a policing problem, only to reappear on the next roadside.
