Transforming Transportation and Paratransit Day
Transforming Transportation and Paratransit Day are just around the corner, and excitement is building for the different events. Here is an overview of what is happening and links to the registrations:
Focus: low-carbon transport financing, just transition, resilient systems, infrastructure, green logistics, and inclusive and safe mobility.
Shared & Popular Transportation Happy Hour, co-hosted by Uber and the Shared-Use Mobility Center
When: Tuesday, the 19 March, at 6:30 p.m.
Where: At Proper 21 on K Street, NW, DC.
Note: We've already reached our maximum capacity for registration for this event, so if you've registered, see you there! We hope to see you at our other events if you haven't already done so.
Paratransit Day
We hope to see many of you next week!
Informal Transport: An Untapped Climate Change Solution
In February, the Trufi Association hosted a webinar on the role of popular transportation in tackling Climate Change.
"The continuous increase in the number of fossil-fueled, under-regulated vehicles all over the global South poses setbacks in the fight against climate change if it is continuously neglected. However, the growing numbers could still be a great win if harnessed."- Geofrey Ndhogezi, executive director at Uganda’s Traffic Safety Awareness Organisation (TRASAO).
Popular transportation is mainly driven by supply and demand. However, if we continue to let these market forces shape the transportation future alone, it could slow down a sustainable transition. Therefore, it is crucial to bring popular transportation into the center of policy debates.
Some recommendations from Trufi for governments:
1. Recognize popular transport as lawful modes. In that way, they can be included in decarbonization strategies.
2. Improve electric vehicle affordability by subsidies or swap conventional with electric bikes.
3. Provide supply chain systems and standards to ease the maintenance of electric vehicles.
If you are interested in more, here is the complete blog post by Geofrey Ndhogezi.
The future of e-buses in India
In many countries, rising fuel prices have threatened the business of private bus operators. This has fueled the interest of many providers to shift to e-vehicles. However, the cost of the bus adoption remains still a hurdle.
The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) assessed the viability of e-buses in non-urban areas in India to reduce greenhouse gases. Their report “The Road Ahead for Private Electric Buses in India” concluded that the solution is making electric buses more accessible through innovative financing strategies.
Key recommendations include:
Governments should offer specialized electric bus loans with reduced interest rates between 4-6%, extended over a longer period of up to 7 years. This approach aims to minimize financial strain while continuing to support the transition.
Funds could be sourced from green financing initiatives, multilateral development agencies, and banks to facilitate these favorable financing conditions. This strategy ensures a minimal upfront fiscal impact on the government and significantly contributes to the decarbonization of the bus sector, particularly in rural and non-urban areas.
Please tell us your opinion in the comments!
Mobilize Your City Paratransit Toolkit is now available in Spanish!
Share the word about this great news!
What’s new in the Informal and Shared Mobility Consortium?
Our friends from the Cape Town Living Lab are researching how to scale up the implementation of technologies in the pop sector. To do so, they got to test Loop - a digital solution for popular transportation in South Africa that joins minibusses with a digital platform. Users book a trip online, select a pick-up and drop-off location, and pay cashless. On top of that, they share their live location, which also increases security.
This tour took place at the African Transport Research Conference, South Africa, and was one of the first conferences to have a complete series on popular transportation operations!
The San José Living Lab met with different stakeholders from academia, police, and the transportation ministry to identify challenges and scale of the popular sector in the city of Costa Rica.
Save the date: Meet and Greet on 17 April AT 15:00 (GMT+1:00)
Join our next Meet and Greet session - a space where our network gets together to learn from each other and share about developments in the popular transport world.
Register here.
More information is coming up soon!
Join our Roster of Experts!
Do you want to participate in our network as an expert, speaker, consultant, or writer? Please fill out this form and share it with anyone who might be interested!
Are you interested in more? If you haven’t done so, join our LinkedIn Group and join the conversation! Also, let us know about events or updates in our sector.
That's it for this month! See you in April!
Pop Transport is the newsletter of the Global Network for Popular Transportation, a global network of researchers, consultants, advocates, companies, agencies, and institutions committed to changing how the world sees popular transportation.
The Global Network for Popular Transportation is a Shared-Use Mobility Center project initiated by Agile City Partners.
The Global Network for Popular Transportation works to ensure that:
Cities, countries, international development agencies, and banks recognize popular transportation as a valid, essential, and important service.
All popular transportation modes are integrated into urban, transport, social, economic, and climate policy and planning efforts.
The key sectors in popular transportation are recognized and participate as equal partners in co-creating accessible, equitable, and sustainable cities. These sectors include workers, entrepreneurs, micro-, small-, and medium enterprises, and small-scale investors.
The world takes an asset-based framework to understanding popular transportation, moving away from simplistic and ineffective approaches focused solely on transportation efficiency to an approach that prioritizes valuing the environment, advancing equity, and empowering people and communities