Welcome to your fourth issue of Pop Transport, the fortnightly newsletter of the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation.
Informal transportation is very, very popular (widespread, and for the people).
It overwhelmingly dominates 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.”
Here’s what you get this week:
Preliminary findings from the Central American Datathon;
All about the newest member of our Board of Advisors;
Further proof GPIT is powered by amazing women;
A save-the-date for a webinar on electric three-wheelers; and,
Significant research from the Development Planning Unit of UCL.
The first big step for the Informal Transportation Encyclopedia
After an intense week of work, our partner CPSU formally closed the Central American Datathon last Saturday (March 13).
The Datathon was a great collaborative effort to collect information about the diverse informal transportation services across Central America.
Here’s the closing session as CPSU broadcast it over Facebook Live. (52 minutes. Spanish.)
The Datathon gathered:
Information about informal transport services from more than 40 cities across nine countries;
Nearly 90 entries describing the local experience of informal transportation users from 27 cities and seven countries; and,
70+ information entries of different thematic categories about informal transport. From photographs, policies, regulations, technology and operations, to arts and culture.
Next step, the Datathon Team will process and review the data and organize it into a draft of the Encyclopedia of Informal Transportation in Central America, the first chapter of what we hope will be a Global Encyclopedia of Informal Transportation.
Please join us in thanking all the participants and everyone who contributed to the event. Special thanks for the lead organizations: the British Embassy in San José, Centro para la Sostenibilidad Urbana, Agile City Partners and the Development Planning Unit from the UCL.
(Leave us a comment or respond to this email if you think you want to do a Datathon for your region.)
WIEGO founder, Martha “Marty” Chen, joins our Board of Advisors
We’re really pleased to announce the newest member of our Board of Advisors, Dr. Martha Chen.
Marty, as she is better known, is a globally recognized development practitioner and scholar. Her areas of specialization are employment, gender and poverty with a focus on the working poor in the informal economy.
Dr. Chen co-founded and for 20 years led WIEGO —Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, a global network focused on empowering the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy to secure their livelihoods. WIEGO is known worldwide for its work to improve the status of the working poor in the informal economy through stronger organizations, improved statistics and research, and a more favorable policy environment. (Marty remains as Emeritus International Coordinator and Senior Advisor for the global network.)
Dr. Chen has also been on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government since 1987. Before joining Harvard, she had two decades of resident work experience in Bangladesh and in India. She received a PhD in South Asia Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
For her work with issues of poverty, employment and gender, Dr. Chen was awarded the Government of India’s highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, in April 2011. She was also honored by the Government of Bangladesh with the Friends of Bangladesh Liberation War award in December 2012.
Women Power
Speaking of honors and women, we’ve got another bit of news to brag about.
The Transformative Urban Mobilty Initiative (TUMI) and Women Mobilize Women named Julia Nebrija in their 2021 list of Remarkable Women in Transportation. Women pick the women who get to be included in the annual list that illuminates the work of “outstanding female experts who have contributed to sustainable mobility solutions.”
Julia is Agile City Partner’s co-founder and GPIT mover.
Please congratulate Julia with us.
This is more proof that Global Partnership for Informal Transportation is powered by globally recognized women in transportation.
Our advisors, Heather Thompson and Mariana Alegre, were also recognized by TUMI and WMW in 2019.
Then there are our good friends and research partners:
Dr. Jacqueline Klopp, Co-Director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development and co-founder of Digital Matatus, was in this year’s list with Julia.
Sonal Shah, founder of Urban Catalysts and the Center for Sustainable and Equitable Cities was in the 2020 list.
A couple of issues back, we told you about the IADB recognizing Andrea San Gil Leòn as one of “Latin America's important female figures working in the transport sector.”
Woot! Woot!
Upcoming Webinar - Save the Date
Keep an eye out for a couple of webinars we’re co-producing with the TUMI for their TUMIVolt Charging Station series.
First up on the 8th of April, a conversation with Sonal Shah and Cedrick Tandong, co-founder of Three Wheels United. We’ll talk about the electrification of auto rickshaws in India. (If you didn’t know, there are now more than 1.5 million electric three-wheelers in India, with about 70,000 entering the market each month.)
Follow us in Twitter for the details and how to register.
BTW
If you want to do some background reading ahead of the webinar:
Check out this summary report from the the webinar Enabling a transition to electric mobility in Intermediate public transport fleets: policies and enabling environment, organized by Asia Clean Mobility Community of Practice in 2018.
Also check this article from earlier this year. It features a WRI survey about EV financing in Delhi. The tl;dr—banks are more comfortable financing electric cars; electric two- and three-wheelers are often left behind.
Urban Mobility and Social Equity in Latin America
UCL’s Development Planning Unit, our research partner, recently launched Volume 12 of Urban Mobility and Social Equity in Latin America: Evidence, Concepts, Methods, a research compilation edited by Dr. Daniel Oviedo, Dr. Natalia Villamizar Duarte and Dr. Ana Marcela Ardila Pinto.
This version compiles contributions from scholars researching a diverse set of cases across the Americas concerning the social impacts of urban mobility and discussing concepts and methods that can help us examine the distributional effects of transport policies in the region. By reviewing how spatial and social mobilities contribute to the reproduction of both spatial and social inequities in Latin American cities, the book provides an exciting collection of research that expands on different fronts on the current literature in and about the region.
We particularly recommend the first chapter in the volume. Should Urban Transport Become a Social Policy? Interrogating the Role of Accessibility in Social Equity and Urban Development in Bogotá, Colombia presents a critical examination of the interaction between concepts such as equity and accessibility in a framework of sustainable and inclusive urban development.
Virtual Meet & Greet
We hosted our first Informal Transportation Virtual Meet & Greet. We kept it casual but it was an interesting hour. We had people call in from Singapore, India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Portugal, Spain, Costa Rica, El Salvador, the U.S.
If you were there, thanks for joining.
If you missed it, no worries. We’ll hold another one soon.
Last Word
We’ll leave you with this article from Nicaraguas 4toMono (4th Monkey), titled “The importance of informal transport, or why you have to take caponeras seriously". It’s a great piece about Nicaragua’s informal three-wheeled motor taxi system. (The article’s in Spanish but you can get a rough translation via google.)
That’s all for now. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, help us reach more people interested in informal transportation.
We’d love to hear back from you if you have any comments or reactions. Click this button:
Pop Transport is the 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 is a project of NewCities, initiated by Agile City Partners, and, supported by CoMotion Inc.
Email us at contact@newcities.org if you are interested in becoming a partner. (Make sure to include “GPIT” in the subject line.)
Hola mi nombre es Luis Victor Alemán Vargas, sociólogo de profesión y apasionado por el transporte informal, radico en la ciudad de La Paz, Bolivia. Me interesa replicar la experiencia de la Dataton en la región de Sur América, específicamente en mi país. Saludos cordiales.