Thirty and four
Here's our 34th issue
Welcome to this thirty-fourth issue of Pop Transport, the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation’s email newsletter.
Informal transportation is very, very popular (widespread, and for the people).
It overwhelmingly dominates shared transportation in the rapidly growing towns and cities of the Global South. It moves billions and employs millions of people around the world.
That’s why we call this newsletter “Pop Transport.”
In this issue:
The latest post on Reimagining the Race to Zero in Africa
A look at the impacts of ride-hailing technology in Ghana
A major report from IADB on transportation and inclusive development in Latin America
Moniot Sheruts and civil society in Israel and Palestine
Reimagining the Race to Zero in the Global South
Joseph Ndiritu penned the latest post from Reimagining the Race to Zero in the Global South: Exploring the Role of Informal Transport in Africa’s Transition Towards Inclusive, Sustainable and Decarbonised Transport.
Ndiritu, national chairman of the Public Transport Operators Union, walks the reader through the experience of workers in Kenya’s matatu industry and argues that they would be critical to fighting climate change.
Dispelling the myth that informal transportation is unregulated, he says, “its workforce is highly regulated by the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA), under Kenya’s Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure, Housing, Urban Development, and Public Works. NTSA requires licenses for drivers and conductors (see photo below).”
Ndiritu concludes:
Decarbonising the transportation sector presents a new opportunity to bring informal transportation workers to the table. They should be listened to, and their ideas incorporated to improve public transport and make cities liveable and habitable. Workers and passenger rights in informal transport should be clearly spelt out and communicated in a language best understood.
The informal transport sector has been left behind in times of crises, calamities and pandemics. They should not be left behind this time around, but instead allowed to lead in road safety campaigns, climate action and decarbonisation. Beyond compliance, allowing the sector to lead will encourage accountability, responsibility and ownership.
ICYMI
In case you missed the rest of the blog posts in the series, you can catch them here:
Reimagining the Race to Zero in the Global South: Exploring the role of informal transport in Africa’s transition towards inclusive, sustainable, and decarbonised transport by Andrea San Gil León
Towards clean, green popular transport by Dr. Jacqueline M. Klopp
Engaging informal transport operators key to accelerating decarbonisation by Geofrey Ndhogezi
The role of data in electrifying informal transport by Louise Ribet
As our colleague Andrea wrote to introduce the series:
…up to 90% of all motorised trips (in Africa) are carried out using informal transport.
Rather than seeing this as a problem, in this monthly blog series we aim to look at informal transport as an asset and an opportunity for an inclusive Race to Zero in the Global South. This blog series will provide examples of how we can rethink business models, governance, regulation and organisation structures, to develop accessible, integrated, inclusive, innovative, bottom-up, and decarbonised mobility solutions for Africa and other countries in the Global South.
The Global Partnership for Informal Transportation collaborated with the SLOCAT Partnership on the blog series, with the support of the Agence Française de Développement (AFD).
Smart for whom?
Festival Godwin Boateng, Samuelson Appau, and Kingsley Tetteh Baako look into The rise of ‘smart’ solutions in Africa: a review of the socio-environmental cost of the transportation and employment benefits of ride-hailing technology in Ghana. (In Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.)
Dr. Boateng and his associates interrogate the impacts of ride-hailing technology in Ghana. “(O)ften presented as a refreshing development for the continent to leverage technology to address its twin problems of inefficient urban transport and rising youth unemployment,” their research suggests that:
…whereas the technology is driving up the standards of road transport experience, the benefits are accessible to a select few (largely, the younger, highly educated and relatively high income-earning class). The lopsided power relations underlying the ride-hailing industry have also meant that the economic opportunities it avails disproportionately benefit a few powerful players (e.g. ride-hailing firms and car owners) while stimulating ‘turf wars’ among online and traditional taxi drivers; deepening existing gender inequalities in access to income-earning opportunities in the commercial passenger transport sector; encouraging unhealthy driving practices, shifts from shared public transport, and inundation of the roads with more private cars. …the paper argues that dismantling the power structures underlying Africa’s urban challenges will require more than splashing ‘smart’ apps and other tech wizardries around. Indeed, the lessons from Ghana’s ride-hailing industry suggest that such exclusively technical solutions could easily take root and pattern after existing strictures of unjust power structures in ways that could exacerbate the social and environmental problems they are supposed to address. (Emphasis added.)
Inclusive mobility in LAC
We haven’t dived deeply into it yet, but we’re sure you’ll want to get your hands on this major report on transportation from the Inter-American Development Bank.
Transport for Inclusive Development: Defining a Path for Latin America and the Caribbean discusses:
“…the role that transport often plays in deepening social disadvantage and poverty and its potential to break the cycle of poverty and inequality through investments and policies that take the needs of poor and socially excluded groups into account. It outlines a conceptual framework for understanding the existing barriers faced by lower income and disadvantaged groups in transport accessibility and social exclusion and explores the multifaceted dimensions of transport(-)related social exclusion, offers solutions to these challenges, and presents several case studies where they have successfully overcome them.”
It’s a heavy volume, clocking 645 pages, consisting of a series of country reports and deep dives.
Some of the takeaways on informal transportation are encouraging.
On recommendation #11.1 Understand and Respond to the Needs of Transport-disadvantaged Populations:
The full participation of beneficiary communities – which can be facilitated through participatory budgeting, active consultations, and local representation in project appraisal and evaluation processes – is critical to ensuring that the entire process of designing and managing projects, from the selection of routes to impact evaluation, is inclusive and responsive to local needs and realities…Such participation and representation should also be extended to the informal and small-scale operators currently meeting the needs of underserved communities. Despite the challenges they bring to cities, these services have flexibility, adaptability to local needs, and social capital that can benefit the processes of formalization and modernization of the public transport supply to low-income neighborhoods.
On recommendation #11.3.1 Improve the Coverage, Quality and Financial Sustainability of Public Transit Systems:
The experiences of various Latin American and Caribbean cities with different forms of formal and informal public transit illustrate a need for a more disaggregated, accessibility-based approach to planning and decision-making. This demands a more nuanced and deeper understanding of the socioeconomic composition of the population and its needs, preferences, and abilities…
Given the high reliance on informal and non-motorized transport in Latin American and Caribbean cities, exploring synergies and alliances between informal operators and elements of formal transport systems (e.g., shared bicycles or other formal operators of on-demand service) could contribute to improving coverage and connectivity at integrated rates that make it cheaper and more convenient to transfer from local services to long-distance ones (i.e., mass transit).
We appreciate the first part of the recommendation but note the all too common intent to relegate informal transportation to “last mile” services as an unquestioned solution.
(a parenthetical)
From a representation standpoint, we are bothered that the first time informal transportation appears as an image (in a report peppered with photos of BRT stations, modern buses, and cable cars) is in the deep dive into Port-au-Prince’s tap taps.
The caption has us shaking our heads.
What do you think? Are we being a little too sensitive?
A Vehicle for Kindness?
We leave you with this inspiring piece from Israel Between the Lines that asks, Is Sherut Culture a Vehicle for Kindness?
The uncredited opinion notes how riders of moniot sheruts (minivans) in Tel Aviv extend the common courtesy of passing the fare to the driver and the change back to the rider.
After hopping on and claiming my seat in the back, I dive deep into my bag for six shekels to cover the NIS 5.90 fare, and tap the person in front of me to pass it up to the driver. The same tap continues with the two people sitting in front of her, and moments later I receive my change.
The author meditates that:
Once one enters this little mobile cabin of kindness, anything is possible. What was once a street full of strangers becomes a hot box of humanity. From learning it’s someone’s birthday and breaking out into song, to lending a shekel because one got away, or ensuring a tourist gets off at the right corner, the van of virtue is its own world of opportunity, and can often make or break your day.
With 150,000 passengers riding the sherut daily, could the act of taking public transport be a positive daily practice to support cultivating kindness and consideration between strangers? A number of studies show that kindness is contagious, and that humans are impacted when they witness or experience a random act of kindness. Could riding the sherut be a built-in benefit to motivate humans to act more humanely?
We hope the unnamed author knows that handing the fare forward and the change back is a common practice in informal transport modes worldwide. It’s one of the things that make popular transportation human.
We hope their observation and hope hold true in that part of the world so riven by division.
If you want to learn more about the moniot sheruts that serve Israel and Palestine, check out Alex Jonlin’s Moniot Sherut: Informal Transit in a Developed Economy.
From the abstract:
In addition to publicly-subsidized bus and rail services, transit in Israel is provided by privately-run minibuses called moniot sherut. This informal transit mode is prevalent throughout the country to a far greater extent than in other highly-developed economies, and remains popular despite regulatory changes and uncertainties. Experience with other informal transit systems in competition with more conventional options across the United States and in other countries indicates that informal transit tends to attract marginalized populations, including immigrants and ethnic minorities. A survey conducted of monit sherut ridership suggests that this holds true in Israel as well, with non-Jewish immigrants vastly overrepresented on informal transit and a huge variety of countries of origin among riders, although women were underrepresented. This may stem from a perception of the monit sherut as a more ethnically-neutral, yet also more male, space than its formal counterpart.
That’s it for this week.
Pop Transport is a fortnightly newsletter of the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation. The Partnership works hand-in-hand with informal urban transportation systems of the Global South to advance innovation, improve services, and change business models. By leveraging new technology and innovative policies, we believe these informal networks can confront climate change and make our cities work for everyone.
The Global Partnership for Informal Transportation is a project of NewCities, initiated by Agile City Partners and supported by CoMotion Inc.
Our Strategic Partners include WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and the Shared-Use Mobility Center.