#25 Bus stop, bus goes, she stays, love grows
Falling in love with the marshrutka
Hello!
Has it been two weeks? It’s been a whirl of a January, hasn’t it?
It has been for me. Later, I’ll tell you all that I’ve been up. Meanwhile, here’s your fortnightly dose of Makeshift Mobility, your first newsletter on innovations in informal transportation.
Yes, your first because here’s your second:
The Global Partnership for Informal Transportation launched its first issue of Pop Transport, another fortnightly newsletter. (I’m going to have to figure out the timing of Makeshift Mobility…)
Follow the link above and subscribe. Then you’ll have another source for informal transportation news. You’ll also catch up on the work that GPIT is nurturing.
In my last letter, I shared what I learned about the brief life of jitneys in the U.S. Were you as surprised as I was about the origin of the term?
I looked up the etymology:
jitney (n.)
"bus which carries passengers for a fare," 1915, short for jitney bus (1906), American English, from gitney, jetney (n.), said in a 1903 newspaper article to be a St. Louis slang for any small coin, especially "a nickel," (the buses' fare typically was a nickel), the coin name attested or suggested by 1898, probably via New Orleans from French jeton "coin-sized metal disk, slug, counter" (see jetton).
And wouldn’t you know, it included a ditty.
"I'll give a nickel for a kiss,"
Said Cholly to a pretty miss.
"Skiddo," she cried, "you stingy cuss,"
"You're looking for a jitney buss."["Jitney Jingle," 1915]
Of course they were singing about informal transportation even at the dawn of the automobile age!
This week, I’m taking you on a deep dive into the informal transportation that serves most of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
I’m not sure where or when I was asked, but someone did ask me, in some forum, about informal transportation in the cities of Central Asia. I confessed to not really know much transportation in the ‘Stans. I said I would certainly start researching.
Imagine my surprise to learn that marshrutkas also serve these post-Soviet states.
Please, share my umbrella
Marshrutka is an umbrella term for minibus services in the mostly ex-Soviet republics. There are some local name variants (microbuze, samarshruto taksi, rutierele) but they are mostly called маршрутка, literally “routed taxi.”
They serve Eastern Europe (Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltic States), Southeastern Europe (Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania) and the Central Asian ‘Stans (Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan).
This wikipedia entry does a good enough job of spanning the geographies but the article is sparse and, according to wikipedia, needs some reconciling.
(I told you, informal transportation needs so much more research. I’m hoping the Asian Development Bank and SLOCAT’s Asian Transportation Outlook project will help.)
That's the way the whole thing started
They’ve been around since the 80s and bloomed after the demise of the USSR and the consequent collapse of municipal transportation systems.
Emily Ziffer gives us more flavor from St. Petersburg:
Technically, a marshrutka is a privately owned minibus or minivan that follows a fixed route, but it’s up to the passenger to tell the driver where he/she wants to get off, and it’s also up to the passenger to hail the minibus down, like a taxi. Really, the marshrutka is a big party taxi where you have the chance to practice screaming in Russian to get the driver’s attention when you want to get off.
I also learned that, for a while, being a marshrutka driver was apparently more profitable than being a doctor.
Beginning in a queue
If you want to know more, head over to the Marshrutka Project. A real gem.
The project was (is?) led by Wladimir Sgibnev and Dr. Lela Rekhviashvili and housed at the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde or (IfL) in Leipzig.
The Marshrutka Project deals with the role of the marshrutka mobility phenomenon in the production of post-Soviet urban spaces, in and beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus. It provides an empirically founded contribution to the larger discussion on post-Soviet transformation, and fosters a still under-represented view on post-Soviet transformation, highlighting – through the lens of the marshrutka phenomenon – the bottom-up and everyday emergence of new orders in the fields of economy, morale, urban development and migration.
It was funded by Volkswagen Foundation’s Central Asia Programme and is (was?) a joint endeavor between 10 universities —five from Central Asia and the Caucasus and five from Germany.
There are links to art and art events, and there were links to videos (sadly, behind a registration link) and, of course, to academic papers.
But if there is one thing you’ll want to download (pdf link) from the Marshrutka Project, it’s Marshrutka Stories: A Visual Archive, a collection of stories from places and people involved in the route taxi business.
The stories provide so much texture on the fabric of informal transportation. I’m tempted to post excerpt after excerpt but I know you’re busy so I’ll choose one: this piece called "Solidarities” by Lela Rekhviashvili, about the drivers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
I picked it because it so captures the social aspects that are part and parcel of makeshift mobility systems around the world.
”It is the right of every man to earn a living with their hard work. Everyone has families, everyone needs to earn money,” say Bishkekian drivers. Becoming a marshrutka driver is fairly easy in this city, which intensifies competition. Drivers know that the more competition there is, the less earnings each driver takes home at the end of the day. But whoever is willing to work cannot be denied work, they assert.
Marshrutka mobility is certainly a lot about competition. But beyond this, it is also about exploited and self-exploited labour, lengthy working hours, little income, endless expenses, and increased responsibilities for drivers. However, these conditions are only viable because marshrutka labor is also about solidarity, sharing, and mutual support. A degree of solidarity shapes relations on different levels: between drivers and passengers, among drivers, between drivers and operating companies, and sometimes even between operating companies and state authorities. Solidarity practices between drivers is possibly the most important to the social reproduction of labour and to the reproduction of marshrutka mobility itself. Having no insurance of any kind, and all responsibilities on their shoulders, drivers would never survive without each other’s support. They share labour, they share work, and they even share property. They collect money for one another’s weddings and funerals, as well as of their kin. They share the cost of accidents and costs of unexpected health challenges. They share everydayness: food, chat, rest, shelter. But of course, the depth of sharing depends on the length of relationships. In some cities, drivers change work places often, searching for better operating companies and working conditions. In others, drivers stay working on a single route for decades. They know the neighbourhood, their passengers, and their colleagues the best; and it is here that they form the strongest and most resilient collectives.
Led me to a vow
Ok, I’ll wrap up here before you say Бу́дьте добры, останови́те, пожалуйста which is Russian for “be kind, stop, please.” Apparently, the more polite way to yell a request to stop when riding a marshrutka. Or, at least that’s the advice Emily Ziffer gives us as part of 6 Phrases to Help You Survive on the Marshrutka
We started with a ditty, I will leave you with a song. A song about marshrutkas, this one from the Belarussian pop group IOWA.
It’s entitled, what else: Маршрутка or marshrutka.
A bit more googling easily leads us to the translated lyrics which translates Маршрутка to “commuter bus.” Ha! You and I know its “route taxi.”
I re-did the (translated) refrain:
No kidding, we met on a route taxi,
We met on a bus number 1, we were sitting in silence
He said, "Good morning", and I pretended I didn't hear him
He squeezed my hand hard,
And afterwards
Everything between us was like in the best (beautiful) movie,
Like the song above, or the Hollies’ Bus Stop? Leave a comment.
Some updates to close up
I’m officially more than a month in my new gig at the Shared-Use Mobility Center. I spent the month getting to know my amazing teammates.
We’re planning a virtual National Shared-Use Mobility Summit this year and I’m excited about how it’s shaping up.
We also surveyed our readers and reimagined SUMC’s Mobility Hub (yes, that’s another newsletter you should sign up for! Trust me.)
GPIT announced the first seven members of its Board of Advisors. Big names!
Last Friday, I was on a panel on Informal Transport and Bus Reforms in the Post-COVID World at the all-virtual 2021 Transforming Transportation conference by World Resources Institute and the World Bank.
The panel was moderated by Benjamin Welle, Director, Integrated Transport & Innovation, WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. I joined: Maria Jara, President, Metropolitan Urban Transport Authority, Lima, Peru; Gershwin Fortune, Director, Public Transport, Cape Town, South Africa; Alana Dave, Public Transport Officer, International Transport Workers Federation; and, Georges Darido, Global Lead on Urban Mobility, World Bank.
I’ll post a link to the video as soon as it’s available.
All for now. Catch you in two weeks.
If you are enjoying this newsletter, please share.
I’m Benjie de la Peña and I’m the CEO of the Shared-Use Mobility Center. I co-founded Agile City Partners, and I am the Chair of the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation.
This year, I splurged and invested in a tandem-electric bike. I have yet to go more than 2 miles away from home but, hey, I’m in Seattle and it’s been wet. I dream of an uber-style, ridehail startup that uses electric tandem bikes. I’ll call it “Tandemonium.” Or maybe I’ll just call it ebodaboda.
Know any angel investors?
I’m convinced that informal transportation can be the single greatest lever to decarbonize the urban transport sector, but only if we stop ignoring it and instead learn to celebrate it so we can transform it.