Thirty and seven

Here's our 37th issue

Dec 18, 2022

Welcome to this thirty-seventh 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:

A global scan of informal and shared mobility data collection
Bangalore autorickshaw drivers roll their own app
Facial recognition failing drivers
Mobility tech companies downsize
Designing infrastructure for minibus taxis in South Africa
Integrating angkots into TransJakarta
Research roundup

A global scan of data collection efforts

Earlier this month, Julia Nebrija, Benjamin de la Peña, and Zaxx Abraham presented at WRI/Digital Transport for Africa (DT4A) ’s webinar series. You can catch the video below.

The Agile City Partners team shared key takeaways from their soon-to-be-released global scan on data collection efforts in informal transportation & shared mobility around the world.

“As part of its newly-launched Informal and Shared Mobility in Low and Middle-Income Countries program, the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) commissioned Agile City Partners (ACP) to conduct a rapid scan of mobility data collection efforts in informal transportation and shared mobility around the world. In this session, ACP presents an overview of their findings, including the key initiatives, projects, or platforms currently in place to collect data. What is important to know about informal transportation, and how might we improve data in this sector?”

The team identified gaps and opportunities, among them the lack of:

Protocols to report or an agreement to standardize the types of information collected (outside GTFS)
Transparency
Ethical guidelines for data collection
Statistical, demographic, and static data on informal transportation: ridership, types of vehicles, age of the vehicle, fuel type
Data on labor/workforce and business data (SMEs)
Local or national government-led examples
Data and efforts from peri-urban, rural, secondary/tertiary cities

The ACP team underscored how none of the data collection efforts seemed to be for the direct benefit of the drivers and operators of informal transportation. This brings us to news from Bangalore that we are watching closely.

Autorickshaw drivers roll their own app

Bangalore’s Autorickshaw Drivers’ Union (ARDU) released Namma Yatri, an app they created to beat Uber and Ola at the ride-hailing game.

D Rudramurthy, general secretary of ARDU, said, “We are just a union of auto drivers who have come together to give everyone a better deal. Nobody should feel cheated — neither drivers nor passengers.”

Uber and Ola have been in the eye of a storm for fleecing auto-rickshaw passengers and short-changing drivers. The Transport Department says the ride-hailing firms do not have a licence to operate. The matter is currently before the High Court of Karnataka.
Namma Yatri wants to be the alternative everyone is looking for.
…Namma Yatri will not charge drivers or passengers anything for at least three months. Passengers will be charged a booking fee of Rs 10, which will be paid to the driver for driving to the pick-up point.
Drivers can also ask for up to Rs 30 over and above the meter fare provided the passenger is willing to pay. Multiple drivers can compete for customers, which means they can choose the one that suits them the most. Payments will be in cash and there will be no cancellation fees.

The Print India gives a thorough backgrounder on how ARDU decided to build Namma Yatri.

Their main aim, the drivers say, is to “win back” customers and to earn better without the “deductions” imposed on their earnings by multi-billion-dollar valuation-driven startups.
“When Ola and Uber came in, they visited auto stands and onboarded us with free mobiles, data, and incentives… in the beginning, it was as high as Rs 1,000 on completion of 10 rides,” said auto driver Govindraj H.J. “But as the years went by, these companies started to charge more commission than the actual fare of the ride, which benefited neither the rider nor the driver.” The hope now is that via an app without an intermediary, drivers as well as customers will benefit.
…Having tried in vain for several years to “build” their own app, the auto rickshaw union drew inspiration from an app-based ride service run by drivers in Kochi, Kerala.

The grassroots initiatives in Bangalore and Kochi could shift the sector’s power balance and contrast with the downward fortunes happening to the giant tech platforms.

Ride-hail apps hit road bumps

Also, in India, MIT’s Technology Review reports on the technology failures plaguing Uber. The failures have severe implications for the drivers and their livelihoods.

The facial recognition feature is not reliable, especially given the cheaper phone technology that the drivers can afford.

Adnan Taqi, an Uber driver in Mumbai, ran into trouble with it when the app prompted him to take a selfie around dusk. He was locked out for 48 hours, a big dent in his work schedule—he says he drives 18 hours straight, sometimes as much as 24 hours, to be able to make a living. Days later, he took a selfie that locked him out of his account again, this time for a whole week. That time, Taqi suspects, it came down to hair: “I hadn’t shaved for a few days and my hair had also grown out a bit,” he says.
Others say they have struggled with scratches on their cameras and low-budget smartphones. The problem isn’t unique to Uber. Drivers with Ola, which is backed by SoftBank, face similar issues

Meanwhile, workers on mobility platforms are losing their jobs.

Massive layoffs at GoTo (Gojek)…

Indonesia’s GoTo group, the $15 billion merged entity of Gojek and Tokopedia, announced that it was slashing 12% of its workforce, with more than 1,250 workers losing their jobs.

“GoTo is the golden child of Indonesia, a national treasure. When they do layoffs, it shocks the entire industry,” said Elon Murz, the moniker of an administrator for Blind-like tech forum Ecommurz, who has since received hundreds of messages from self-identified current and former employees of GoTo.
GoTo management summoned workers to a Zoom town hall, where teary senior leaders announced the layoff decision. In an official statement to the Indonesia Stock Exchange, the company blamed “increasingly challenging global economic conditions.”
“Those [ex-employees] who are angry said the announcement was too long and overly dramatic, especially when the leaders were in tears mid-speech,” Murz told Rest of World.

…and at SWVL

Meanwhile, SWVL, the “Cairo-born, Dubai-based” mobility company, announced another round of layoffs, reducing its already reduced workforce by half.

The company, valued at $1.5 billion when it went public in April of this year, had already fired more than 400 workers just two months after debuting on NASDAQ.

Infrastructure for Informal Transportation

Meanwhile, in hard infrastructure, the Journal of South African Institution in Civil Engineering published a paper by Christo Venter and Lourens de Beer from the University of Pretoria. The report, entitled “Priority infrastructure for minibus-taxis: An analytical model of potential benefits and impacts” (pdf), looks into the benefits of providing dedicated facilities for informal transportation could bring:

…a single lane pre-signal strategy, queue-jumping lane, and dedicated public transport lane. The objective of the paper is to quantify the potential economic impacts of such treatments on minibus-taxi operators, passengers and other road users. The findings indicate that substantial savings could be realised in terms of travel time, user cost, and operating cost to taxi passengers and drivers without additional costs being incurred by other road users. The single-lane pre-signal strategy, the queue-jumping lane and the dedicated taxi lane saw a decrease in total hourly cost of 12%, 14% and 30% respectively, including construction cost, user cost, and agency cost, indicating a net social benefit. If part of these savings were passed on to passengers, priority infrastructure could serve as an implicit subsidy to public transport users.

Angkots and TransJakarta

ICYMI, ITDP’s Fani Rachmita has a great update on Jakarta’s progress in expanding public transportation. We were particularly enthused by this tidbit in her piece Jakarta: The Need to Keep Moving Forward.

In 2019, Jak Lingko, a public transport integration system consisting of physical, tariff, and operational integration, was launched by the city. Jak Lingko aimed to bring together all of the city’s public transport modes into one cohesive system, starting with the many microbuses (angkot). With their small dimensions, angkot can traverse narrow streets, which are common in Indonesian cities, including Jakarta. At its introduction, only three operators were interested in joining the Jak Lingko program; today, around 15 operators are part of the program. The angkot hit 250,000 passengers per day before and during the pandemic, expanding the Transjakarta network coverage to 82 percent by the end of December 2021.

Our sister newsletter, Makeshift Mobility, has a great intro to angkots, the microbuses that serve Indonesia.

Research roundup

Lastly, check out the newly released Transport and Mobility Futures in Urban Africa, edited by Ransford A. Acheampong, Karen Lucas, Michael Poku-Boansi, and Chinebuli Uzondu. The volume:

…provides a collection of insightful conceptual and empirical works that situate transport and mobility challenges in the unique context of individual countries and cities while highlighting commonalities across the African continent.

The twenty-four chapters are organized under the following:

Urban Form, Accessibility, and Travel Demand
Transport Poverty, Equity and Inclusion
Public Transport Policy and Governance
Non-motorized Transport and Traffic Safety
ICT, Platforms and New Technologies, and
Creating New Futures

That’s it for this issue. Leave us a comment and share our newsletter.

Pop Transport | The GNPT Newsletter

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