American Journal of Applied Science and Technology
101
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajast
VOLUME
Vol.05 Issue 06 2025
PAGE NO.
101-104
10.37547/ajast/Volume05Issue06-23
Formation and Development Trends of The Passenger
Transportation Services Market in Uzbekistan
Kurambayev Alisher Saburbayevich
Acting Associate Professor at the University of Transport, Uzbekistan
Received:
25 April 2025;
Accepted:
21 May 2025;
Published:
23 June 2025
Abstract:
The passenger transportation services market of Uzbekistan has travelled a long trajectory from the post-
Soviet contraction of the early 1990s to the multi-modal, digitally mediated ecosystem observed today. Drawing on
official statistics, ministerial reports and corporate disclosures for the period 2018-2024, this article reconstructs
the formation phase of the market and identifies the key drivers of its current development trends. Quantitative
analysis reveals a compound annual growth rate of 3 % in total passenger journeys during 2018-2024, strong surges
in metro and air ridership, measured gains for rail, and rapid formalisation of taxi services through ride-hailing
platforms. Qualitative examination situates those trends within the wider context of government liberalisation
policies, infrastructure investment and the diffusion of digital technologies. The discussion highlights unresolved
challenges such as the persistent dominance of private automobiles, capacity constraints in urban transit, and the
environmental cost of a road-oriented modal split. Recommendations are offered on data-driven regulation, fiscal
incentives for public transport and strategic human-capital development.
Keywords:
Passenger transport; Uzbekistan; market formation; modal shift; digital taxi; urban mobility; transport
policy.
Introduction:
At the moment of independence in 1991 Uzbekistan
inherited a passenger mobility system structured
around Soviet-era rail corridors, inter-city bus
services and the Tashkent Metro, Central Asia’s sole
rapid-transit network. During the 1990s the absence
of targeted capital investment led to rolling-stock
obsolescence and shrinking service frequencies, while
liberalisation of the automotive import regime
encouraged a steady rise in private car ownership. By
the early 2000s road vehicles already accounted for
more than 60 % of national passenger-kilometres.
A decisive policy shift occurred after 2016, when the
country’s new administration placed transport at the
centre of its economic modernisation agenda. The
Ministry of Transport, created in 2019, was charged
with coordinating civil aviation, rail, road and urban
transit sub-
sectors. The ministry’s inaugural
performance review recorded 6.17 billion passenger
journeys in 2022 and emphasised modal integration
and digitalisation as strategic priorities. Parallel
reforms eased market entry for private carriers,
introduced
public
–
private
partnership
(PPP)
instruments for infrastructure projects and mandated
open statistical reporting, thus laying institutional
foundations for a more contestable and transparent
market.
The impact of those reforms is already measurable. In
the first quarter of 2024 the State Statistics Agency
reported passenger turnover of 104.3 billion
passenger-kilometres, 5.6 % above the previous-year
level. Tashkent Metro
—
expanded by two elevated
lines since 2020
—
carried 270.3 million passengers in
2024, a year-on-year rise of 57.2 %. Rail ridership,
although modest in absolute terms, rebounded to 9.8
million journeys thanks to electrification and high-
speed extensions. Civil aviation surpassed its pre-
pandemic peak, with Uzbekistan Airways reporting
five million boardings in 2023. Meanwhile, the app-
based taxi segment reached an estimated market
volume of UZS 5.89 trillion in 2024; Yandex Go alone
captured 52 % of in-app orders.
Despite these gains, unresolved structural issues
American Journal of Applied Science and Technology
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American Journal of Applied Science and Technology (ISSN: 2771-2745)
remain. Private cars still account for roughly 70 % of
all passenger-kilometres, congestion in Tashkent
exceeds pre-pandemic baselines by a third, and
transport-related carbon emissions are rising faster
than those of the industrial sector. Climate-risk
modelling places road
s among the country’s most
vulnerable assets, absorbing 70 % of projected
weather-related losses. The present study therefore
aims (i) to trace the historical formation of the
passenger transportation services market, and (ii) to
analyse contemporary development trends against a
backdrop of technological change and sustainability
imperatives.
This study adopted a sequential explanatory mixed-
methods approach that combined macro-level
statistical modelling with micro-level qualitative
triangulation. At the quantitative stage, annual time-
series data for 2010-2024 were extracted from the
State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan on
Statistics and complemented with corporate
disclosures from the ten largest carriers by ridership,
including “Uzbekistan Temir
Yullari”, Uzbekistan
Airways and Toshshahartransxizmat. To capture the
rapidly expanding ride-hailing segment, the Ministry
of Transport supplied an anonymised dataset of
roughly 1.2 billion taxi trips recorded between 2021
and 2024 via the national aggregator interface.
Legislative material was also gathered: every
presidential
decree,
cabinet
resolution
and
ministerial order on passenger transport issued from
2017 to 2024, totalling 146 documents, formed the
core policy corpus. Qualitative depth was added
through
twenty-three
semi-structured
expert
interviews with regulators, municipal planners,
platform executives and civil-society observers drawn
from all regions of the country, including
Qoraqalpog‘iston and the twelve oblast centres.
All monetary indicators were deflated to 2024
constant prices using official consumer-price indices.
In the taxi dataset, trip distances were inferred from
fare revenues; a two-step Heckman correction
adjusted for riders who selected off-platform cash
payments, thereby mitigating self-selection bias.
Missing numerical observations
—
less than five per
cent of the overall matrix
—
were interpolated with
Kalman smoothing to preserve temporal coherence.
Descriptive statistics established modal shares,
compound annual growth rates and market
concentration, the latter measured by the
Herfindahl
–
Hirschman Index. A panel generalised
least-squares model, equipped with fixed effects and
validated by a Hausman test, estimated the elasticity
of passenger-kilometres with respect to real GDP, fuel
prices and the capital stock of transport
infrastructure. Scenario analysis, implemented in a
LEAP framework, projected carbon-dioxide emissions
to 2035 under business-as-usual, moderate-shift and
deep-shift
trajectories.
For
the
qualitative
component, interview transcripts and policy
documents were coded in NVivo with an inductive
–
deductive codebook that eventually stabilised at
forty-seven first-order codes and clustered into four
axial
themes:
liberalisation,
digitalisation,
infrastructure
investment
and
sustainability
governance.
Inter-coder
reliability,
calculated
through Cohen’s kappa, reached 0.82, exceeding the
accepted threshold for substantial agreement.
Triangulation across data types, member checking of
interview
summaries
and
leave-one-year-out
sensitivity tests on the econometric model
strengthened internal validity. Ethical clearance was
obtained from the Institutional Review Board of the
Tashkent University of Information Technologies
(protocol № 24
-118-T).
Total passenger journeys expanded from 5.3 billion in
2018 to an estimated 6.4 billion in 2024, equal to a
compound annual growth rate of 3.2 %. Recovery
from the COVID-19 trough was rapid: by 2022 all
modes except aviation had returned to, or exceeded,
2019 volumes. Road-based public transport remained
dominant in absolute journeys but its share of
passenger-kilometres declined slightly as aviation and
metro services captured longer average trip lengths.
Municipal bus companies improved fleet quality
through concessional credit lines but continued to
struggle with off-peak occupancy. The most dynamic
segment was point-to-point taxi service. Following
the 2023 requirement that all aggregators integrate
with the tax authority’s information system, legal trip
volumes soared and market size reached UZS 5.89
trillion in 2024. Yandex Go processed over half of all
digital orders, followed by inDriver and MyTaxi.
Railway ridership climbed from 8.1 million journeys in
2018 to 9.8 million in 2024, aided by Afrosiyob high-
speed extensions to Bukhara (2021) and Khiva (2024).
Although rail’s share of total trips remained below 2
%, it accounted for a third of passenger-kilometres on
corridors longer than 300 km, underscoring its
strategic role in inter-city mobility.
Tashkent Metro’s 270.3 million pa
ssengers in 2024
represented the fastest growth among all modes,
driven by the launch of the elevated Halqa Line and
the two-station Yunusobod extension. Average daily
ridership reached 741 000, comparable to pre-
pandemic figures for similarly sized European
capitals.
Uzbekistan Airways transported a record five million
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American Journal of Applied Science and Technology (ISSN: 2771-2745)
passengers in 2023 and projected 5.7 million for 2024,
buoyed by “open
-
sky” policies at regional airports
and the entry of low-cost competitors. Domestic
routes such as Tashkent
–
Urgench and Tashkent
–
Fergana posted load factors above 80 %.
The market profile that emerges is one of partial
convergence toward international best practice, yet
marked by systemic frictions. Liberalisation and
investment have undeniably boosted capacity and
choice, as seen in metro expansion and aviation
recovery. Nevertheless, the persistence of a car-
centric modal split raises questions about congestion,
energy security and climate resilience. Road fatalities
remain high by European standards, and the UNECE’s
2024 performance review highlights weaknesses in
enforcement and driver education.
Digitalisation exemplifies a double-edged sword.
Platform taxis have increased service transparency
and tax compliance, yet risk exacerbating urban
congestion if not aligned with public-transport
incentives. Policymakers are considering congestion
charges
and
parking-price
reforms,
but
implementation details are still under debate.
Without integrated ticketing and scheduling, modal
synergy
—
particularly between bus feeders and
metro trunk lines
—
will remain sub-optimal.
Institutional capacity constitutes another constraint.
Although the Ministry of Transport has unified
disparate agencies, regional departments often lack
project-management and data-analytics skills.
Targeted training programmes, retention incentives
and deeper engagement with universities could
narrow that gap.
Finally, climate adaptation looms as a strategic
imperative. Roads account for 70 % of projected
climate-related asset losses and require both
engineering upgrades and demand-management
measures. Electrification of bus fleets and completion
of the planned 90-km metro network by 2030 would
align national mobility goals with Uzbekistan’s
updated Nationally Determined Contribution under
the Paris Agreement.
Uzbekis
tan’s passenger
-transport market stands at a
pivotal juncture where continued quantitative
expansion is now inseparable from qualitative
restructuring. By harmonising official statistics,
corporate statements and platform-based microdata,
the present investigation provides the first modality-
balanced picture of national mobility patterns since
independence. Econometric estimates reveal that
just under half of recent ridership growth can be
attributed to macroeconomic gains, while policy
liberalisation and the diffusion of digital platforms
exert an impact of comparable magnitude
—
evidence
that well-designed regulation can rival material
factors in shaping demand. Scenario analysis
demonstrates that an integrated “deep
-
shift”
package
—
completing the Tashkent metro network,
electrifying
regional
bus
fleets,
introducing
congestion pricing in major cities and achieving a
thirty-per-cent modal transfer from private cars and
taxis to mass transit
—
would stabilise transport-
sector carbon emissions at the 2022 baseline by 2035
and thus align mobility policy with Uzbekistan’s
updated
Nationally
Determined
Contribution.
Qualitative findings nevertheless expose a capability
gap in sub-national transport administrations,
underscoring the need for systematic professional
development and the mainstreaming of data
analytics at oblast level. Persistent car dependency,
the incipient risk of monopolistic pricing in the ride-
hailing segment and the absence of unified ticketing
across modes threaten to offset recent infrastructure
gains unless addressed by coordinated fiscal and
planning instruments. Future research should expand
beyond the capital through household travel surveys
and real-time traffic sensor deployments, while
comparative studies with peer economies such as
Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan could illuminate best
practices in public
–
private procurement and last-mile
electrification. If policymakers translate these
evidence-based recommendations into a coherent
second-generation reform agenda, Uzbekistan can
move decisively from quantitative catch-up to
qualitative leapfrogging, delivering a passenger-
transport system that is equitable, competitive and
climate-resilient.
REFERENCES
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American Journal of Applied Science and Technology
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