On-road fuel economy of Nairobi boda-boda motorcycle taxis from fill-to-fill telematics

Motorcycle taxis ( boda-bodas ) dominate short-distance urban mobility in many sub-Saharan African cities, but reliable in-use fuel-economy values for these fleets are scarce, and the few existing estimates rely on self-reported survey data. We re-analyse a recent open dataset that combines GPS trip telematics with daily fuel-purchase logs for 118 internal-combustion (ICE) boda-bodas operating across six urban and peri-urban areas of Nairobi, Kenya, in late 2023. Fuel economy is reconstructed from fill-to-fill intervals so that each litre of fuel purchased is matched to the kilometres it was actually used to drive, and intervals are weighted by distance. The filtered fleet mean is 3.02 ± 0.08 L/100 km (95% bootstrap confidence interval about the mean), with a small, statistically inconclusive tendency for peri-urban riding to consume more fuel per kilometre than urban riding (3.15 versus 2.93 L/100 km; the gap is not significant at the rider level). The result is roughly one-third lower than the prior questionnaire-based estimate of 4.6 ± 0.4 L/100 km (also 95% CI) for the same city, and the gap is consistent with recall and odometer biases in survey instruments combined with fleet renewal over the intervening decade. The 3 L/100 km figure provides a tighter ICE baseline for total-cost-of-ownership and CO 2 comparisons in ongoing boda-boda electrification programmes.