#19 Informal potato, Informal potahto

Let's call the whole thing "essential homegrown transportation"

Hey Inbox Friend,

How are you? Ready for another dose of informal transportation geekery?

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You say eether and I say eyether

I got a lot of reactions from my last letter. I told you about how the terms we use for what we talk about here are so deficient. I listed the current terms and you picked what made sense.

Kevin likes pop-transport.So did Vanessa, Arjana (via Linked.in), and Evan (via Facebook). Louise said some french academics say artisanal transportation. Sarah Jo uses makeshift mobility. D. Taylor and Ellen still prefer informal transportation.

I’m thinking we should have these terms duke it out March Madness style. What do you think?

I was wrong about something though. I said that LSE came up with the term popular transportation. It was actually my friend Jackie Klopp who came up with the term. (Sorry, Jackie!)

Jackie is the co-founder of Digital Matatus and co-director of Columbia U’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development. She first used the term in Visualising Popular Transportation, a piece she wrote for LSE’s Urban Age.

She says:

From Cape Town to Cairo most people rely on walking, motorcycles, bicycles and minibuses to get around. These forms of popular transport move large numbers of people and goods and employ a plethora of workers. While imperfect, this makes urban life possible and productive…

Given this ‘informality’, popular transport, while strongly present on the street, is often absent from planning, policy and projects. Ambitious infrastructure investment is underway in many African cities, animated by a modernist ideal that envisions eventually replacing these systems. The focus is on expanded highways, Bus Rapid Transit or commuter rail, which, while sometimes necessary, are not sufficient to make cities work well for people. By marginalising popular transport in planning, new infrastructure tends to perform poorly and often adversely impacts people using these modes.

I say preach, sister!

The juxtaposition of “strongly present on the street” and “often absent from planning, policy and projects” is what I’m trying to change through Makeshift Mobility.

You say tomato and I say…the state plays a part in the production of urban transport informalities

In that same week, Gaurav Mittal released “The state and the production of informalities in urban transport: Vikrams in Dehradun, India.”

Totally serendipitous.

His main contention is that “informality” does not exist ex nihilo. It doesn’t spring automagickally from cities, like mushrooms in wet Seattle soil. I mean, transportation does, because people need to get around. But what gets defined as informal is a product of actions taken (or not taken) by society and government.

Gaurav looks at the history of Vikrams in the city of Dehradun in Uttarakhand, India and finds that it is government—in its fractured, multi-layered, multi-actor incoherence—that gets to define what is informal transportation.

From his conclusion:

The case of Vikrams plying in Dehradun reveals numerous ways in which the state plays a part in the production of urban transport informalities. Whether it is through its obsolete laws with their colonial roots leading to conflict with technological changes over time, or its move to create the possibilities of (de)legitimizing their operations, or the multiplicities of interests within its different sections, the state assumes a central role in the production of informalities. By historicizing the case of Vikrams and their multiple encounters with informalities, the paper reveals the multiple modi operandi that are crucial to the state in its dealings with informality. It unearths the role of actors, practices, processes, and temporality to help understand the workings of the state with regards to transport informalities.

Gaurav is a President's Graduate Fellow at the Geography Department of the National University of Singapore. His paper is excellent! I could not recommend it more.

(Btw, the paper is behind a paywall. Reply to this newsletter via email if you want a copy. I know a guy who knows a guy…)

You say auto rickshaw, I say vikram

TIL that a vikram is a three-wheeler that looks like a rickshaw but carries 6 to 7 passengers and follows a set route.

Vikrams in Dehradun. Photo from Hindustan Times.

Here’s an electric vikram developed by Team Despat in India.

Cause you like this and the other, while I go for this and that

I reached out to Gaurav and asked him how he got interested in informal transportation. He wrote back.

“I grew up in Uttarkashi, a small town in the Himalayas near India-Tibet (China) border. Dehradun is the nearest city to my town and also a gateway to more populous areas in the plains. As a child whenever I visited Dehradun, I used to be intrigued by the sight of Vikrams, the vehicles which were neither like the buses or the autorickshaws, which we used to take in bigger cities like Delhi. In some ways, I always associated Dehradun with Vikrams.

“Later, when I developed an academic interest in urban transport, I decided to research on transport in Dehradun for my master’s dissertation. That research was on the implementation of the national government’s urban infrastructure development programme (Jawaharlal National Nehru Urban Renewal Mission – JNNURM).

The research revealed that the transport projects under the programme failed to bring conceived transformations in the city’s transport. I found that one of the reasons of this failure was the already existing strong public transport network in the city, which involved the individually-owned and privately-operated set of vehicles in the form of Vikrams, buses, and four-wheeler trucks.

“…While I was conducting fieldwork for this research, I realised that in official narratives, Vikrams are treated differently than buses and four-wheeler trucks. While Vikrams are considered ‘informal’, other vehicles are treated as ‘public’ transport. I got interested in understanding this ‘othering’ of Vikrams within the city’s transport landscape and decided to dig a little deeper to understand how this ‘othering’ gets operationalised, and what it does.”

What about you? Why and how did you get interested in informal transportation? What got you started?

But oh! If we call the whole thing off, then we must part…

I leave you with two more items this week.

This is something I produced for the VREF Research Forum. They asked us to submit “video postcards” to show on the ground realities of informal transportation.

I decided to interview my good friend Reycel Hyacenth “Hya” Bendaña.

Hya is an outstanding young leader, a transportation advocate, one of the leaders of the Move As One Coalition in the Philippines, daughter of a jeepney driver, and all around amazing human being.

I asked Hya what it was like to grow up in a family that makes its living from informal transportation. We had a 30 minute conversation. I distilled it down to 4:31 minutes. (The video, taken via a zoom call, is crappy but the audio is excellent. )

Thanks to Stan Turner of ITDP for giving me the opportunity. Thanks to Mats Jarnhammar of Living Cities for accepting the video.

For we know we need each other so…

Remember Triyono, founder of Difa Bikes?

I also shared a video about his innovation, making motor becaks that work for the disabled, in the last issue. Turns out my best friend Mai Tatoy and her team at Our Better World did an in-depth feature on Triyono.

The article includes a VR video (which I haven’t gotten to work on my gadgets) that immerses you in the experience of the disabled as they navigate the obstacles of transportation systems.

Triyono says this about transportation and the disabled, “The key is mobility and visibility. After that comes acceptance, appreciation, and inclusivity.”

I just imagine how long it takes formal transportation to make accommodations for the differently-abled. (The design process, the consultations, the approvals, the tenders, the procurement…)

Meanwhile, here’s Triyono and his friends taking informal transportation, innovating, then making it work for his community. Difa Bikes doesn’t just give the disabled mobility, they also provide livelihoods!

Triyono says, “All our drivers have mild disabilities and low education levels. Before, they were unmotivated. Now they speak better, and care about their appearance. They are also better off financially.”

“Before Difa, wheelchair-bound passengers had no affordable means to travel across the city.”
-Photo and caption shamelessly stolen from Our Better World.

That’s it for this week. My apologies to Fred Astaire and thanks for making it all the way to the end of my letter.

One more thing…

Expect a short announcement in your inbox next week, an interstitial before your fortnightly dose. We’re announcing something at CoMotion LA.

Stay safe. Wear a mask. Protect democracy.

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I’m Benjie de la Peña and my plate is full! I believe makeshift mobility could be the single greatest lever to decarbonize the urban transport sector—but only if we can organize.

I’m a transport geek but also a systems innovator. I think I’ve found a couple of places to stand to move the world and I am scared sh*tless but excited as hell. Stay tuned.