The reason development had not yet extended southward was that the southern bay was an important shipping lane. Mombasa Island divided Mombasa Bay into two parts, and the southern harbor was broad and deep. Building bridges there would greatly weaken Mombasa Port's shipping conditions, whereas the north and west had no such concern.
Mombasa had followed the same development path in its previous life, building bridges to connect Mombasa Island with the northern and western mainland. Before this, a railway bridge had already linked the west with Mombasa Island. Now, the Eastern Province Provincial Government planned to further expand the economic ties between Mombasa Island and the mainland.
Yet completing the Grand Mombasa Plan would not be easy for Eastern Province in its current state. To realize the Grand Mombasa Plan, it would need at least 1.5 million people, while Mombasa's current population was under 700,000.
In the past, the populations of East Africa's major cities had not grown quickly. The most typical examples were Dar es Salaam city and Mombasa city. Given East Africa's economic scale and population, if it had been a free-market country, both places would likely have surpassed one million people many years ago.
The United States could serve as a reference here. By the mid-nineteenth century, New York's population had already exceeded one million, while the entire United States had only around twenty million people at the time. Now, East Africa's population, blacks included, was only a little over ninety million, yet it did not have a single city with more than one million residents. This made East Africa's urban development path all the clearer.
Therefore, Mombasa's urban development was constrained by population, and this was a major problem. However, it was not without opportunity. One of the First Five-Year Plan's objectives was precisely to