Welcome to your twelfth issue of Pop Transport, the fortnightly newsletter of the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation.
Informal transportation is very, very popular (e.g.-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, we’ll share six links:
A new paper from the World Bank’s SSATP on fare collection systems in African cities;
A piece on the impact of electric two-wheelers on local economies in India;
“Why every platform wants to be a super app;”
A piece on how “Tuk Tuks and Bikes Show the Way to Net Zero;”
A paper calling for policy interventions to generate the data needed to decarbonize informal transportation in Sub-Saharan Africa; and,
A paper that compares the reach of informal transportation in seven major African cities.
A look at innovation in fare collection systems
The World Bank’s Africa Transport Policy Program and the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility just released “Innovation in Fare Collection Systems for Public Transport in African Cities” (pdf download).
The authors of the paper (Fatima Arroyo-Arroyo, Phillip van Ryneveld, Brendan Finn, Chantal Greenwood, and Justin Coetzee) draw on case studies from five cities (Cape Town, Kigali, Lagos, Maputo, and Nairobi) to investigate the emerging payment landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa. They identify key trends and the implications.
The report offers a series of takeaways. We have to highlight these:
Paratransit is by far the most successful form of public transport in Africa, measured by number of trips and accounting for the majority of trips in almost all African cities.
Significant improvement of paratransit requires changing the business model to enable collective rather than individualized management of the fleet while maintaining the drive toward serving passengers’ trip needs.
Automated fare systems can enable change, but are likely to fail if not implemented in ways that address the power relations and incentive structures between drivers, operators, and passengers.
The authors also recommend that governments attempting to implement digital fare collection systems “need to steer more than row,” and advise governments to find “ways of stimulating and responding positively to private initiative.”
City-level authorities must appreciate that they are often not well placed to understand how fare systems are embedded as an integral part of the bus business. They need to resist imposing technological solutions from outside, and instead find ways of responding to bus operator needs.
Electric two-wheelers can significantly lower costs of operators for hyper local deliveries
The World Resources Institute looks at the impact the electric two-wheeled vehicles would have on (hyper) local economies in India. The article by Dr. Parveen Kumar, Leona Nunes, and Madhav Pai looks at the dynamics and costs of the shortest segment of last mile delivery systems, which they call “hyperlocal” delivery.
In last-mile delivery, the agents of courier companies deliver packages from the central hub to the customer’s doorstep in areas up to 30 kilometer using bikes, vans, or other transport modes…In hyperlocal delivery, the courier agent mainly delivers the product from the seller to the customer within an area of 5 (to) 15 kilometres using mainly [two-wheelers] in a time range of 2-8 hours. Also, there are no package restrictions in last-mile deliveries whereas hyperlocal deliveries usually cover packages up to 12 kilograms…there are more than 110 registered companies for on-demand hyperlocal service delivery across various Indian cities; including those in small- and medium-sized towns. While the scale of these companies varies from 100 orders per day to 1,000 , the use of [two-wheelers] remains the constant factor in fulfilling last mile delivery.
The authors look at the economics of the “last mile” of delivery (that could account for as much as 40% of the overall supply chain cost). They say that, based on their own Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model, electric two-wheelers are more economically viable:
At an average daily travel distance of 50 kilometer, the TCO per kilometer of low-cost [electric two-wheelers] using Lithium-ion battery (LIB_LC) is ~57 % and high-cost [electric two-wheelers] using Lithium-ion battery (LIB_HC) is ~27% less than petrol-[two-wheelers]…creating a significant business opportunity for [electric two-wheelers] in last-mile and hyperlocal delivery.
In Africa and Asia, informal transportation ride hailing apps are the gateway to super apps
Over at Rest of the World, Yinka Adegoke looks at why every platform wants to be a super app. Yink focuses on Gozem, which started out as a ride hailing app for zèmidjans (a.k.a. “zems” - the motorcycle taxis of Benin and Togo). Gozem plans to grow by following the trail blazed by Gojek (now GoTo) in becoming a super app, becoming the digital financial gateway for its users.
Gozem co-founder, Emeka Ajene, explains the logic:
“There’s a certain market pull towards super apps for bottom-of-the-pyramid users, as they eliminate certain pain points that multiple, single-purpose apps present to users,” said Ajene…Those pain points include challenges, like most consumers owning cheaper low-storage smartphones, which force the user to delete some apps in order to download others, and the overall cost of internet data. “[Super apps] bundle together frequently used services, like transport, shopping, delivery, and more into a uniquely high ‘bang for your buck’ experience to this value-conscious segment, and they also present an often underappreciated economic boost and job creation for local economies.”
Two- and three-wheelers are closer to achieving Net Zero than other vehicle categories
Colin McKerracher, writes a quick summary of his latest BNEF report for Bloomberg’s Hyperdrive Daily newsletter. The BNEF provides an industry outlook on trends in electric vehicles.
This latest edition “now covers all of road transport, from the three-wheeled tuk tuks plying the streets of Bangkok to e-bus deployments in Beijing and luxury electric SUVs parked in driveways in Orange County, California.”
We were particularly excited by Colin’s key takeway that:
Some segments of road transport are much closer to achieving Net Zero than others.
Two-wheelers, three-wheelers and buses already are well on their way and can probably even achieve net zero well before 2050, thanks in large part to an early start in China with these segments that’s now spreading to other countries.
We are very encouraged by the numbers.
We hope the next reports are also able to break down the private vehicles from public and shared-use vehicles. We suspect informal transportation represents a much larger slice of the global fleet of two- and three-wheeled vehicles.
Meanwhile…
Data and decarbonization: informal transportation
Katherine A. Collett and Stephanie A. Hirmer, writing in the June 2021 issue of the Nature Sustainability journal, looked at the data needed to decarbonize paratransit in Sub-Saharan Africa. They call for a more systemic approach to data collection as a key enabler for sustainably transitioning to electric vehicles.
They look at the challenges of driving that transition “where transport and electricity systems are poorly defined due to a lack of data, such as those dominated by paratransit.”
They suggest that governments:
…incentivize participation in Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking of paratransit vehicles. GPS mobility mapping has already been implemented and well received. Suggestions for more complete mechanisms include mandatory fitting of GPS trackers in vehicles or providing paratransit operating licenses on the condition of tracking, which may face opposition.
As a cautionary note to the optimism of the BNEF report above, Collett and Hirmer remind us that:
…transitioning from ICE vehicles to EVs is an important step towards climate compatible growth in [low income countries]. However, this process is challenging; it incorporates an additional demand on already fragile electricity systems, a common condition across many [Sub-Saharan Africa] countries, and requires the joining of two siloed systems: transport and electricity.
Walk to informal transportation
Speaking of mobility datasets, this paper from Falchetta, Noussan, and Hammad compare informal transportation in seven major African cities.
The authors use GTFS datasets (a number of which are from Digital Transportation for Africa) to compare the reach of informal transportation routes vs. the populations of the select cities.
Accessibility to transit, together with other important system characteristics such as network coverage and frequency, is a crucial driver of modal choice for urban commuting. In turn, commuting is a major driver of energy consumption and of socio-environmental externalities in cities. So far, few quantitative and comparative assessments of paratransit in cities of Africa have been carried out due to data scarcity and the prevalence of informal services. Here we leverage the recent release of General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data to produce comparative metrics of accessibility, network, and service quality of paratransit in seven major cities in sub-Saharan Africa (Abidjan, Accra, Addis Ababa, Freetown, Harare, Kampala, Nairobi).
Their analysis shows:
…in most of the functional urban areas analysed, nearly three quarters of the population lives within a 10-min walk from the nearest mapped paratransit route. Yet, in absolute terms several hundreds of thousands are found to reside outside of these thresholds.
Among the authors’ conclusions:
Economic development has historically been associated with growing transport demand but considerably different outcomes in infrastructure development and passenger modal choice. In the ‘global north’ people are generally accustomed to strict classifications, such as public/private or legal/unauthorized transport. We believe that it is instead crucial to avoid these false dichotomies when studying mobility in cities with strong demographic and territorial growth. The focus should move on what really is important: to ensure accessible, efficient, sustainable and affordable transit.
That’s it for this week. Our thanks to Greg Lindsay for giving us a heads up on some of the links above.
Leave us a comment if any of the articles intrigued you.
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.
Email us at contact@newcities.org if you are interested in becoming a partner. (Make sure to include “GPIT” in the subject line.)