#40 As I was saying...
...so, where were we?
Hey Friend,
It’s been nearly three months since your last fix of Makeshift Mobility. What’s keeping you busy these days?
Me?
I’ve been preoccupied with some significant to-dos. Mostly with my Shared-Use Mobility hat.
Last month, we staged the 2022 National Shared Mobility Summit. We’ve been preparing for over a year. The run-up to the event was, of course, crazy. It’s our first in-person Summit in nearly three years.
Shout out to my fantastic SUMC team:
Our theme was “All Together Now: Collective Action for Shared Mobility.” We’re trying to mobilize the sector. (Pun intended.)
I love the conference graphic that Benjamn Marasco created for us.
I think it deserves to be in Graphis or Communication Arts, don’t you?
We also launched the Shared Mobility 2030 Action Agenda at the Summit.
It’s a sector-wide to-do list to “confront the climate crisis, redress the inequality in our communities, and ease the cost burdens of transportation for families.”
The goal is to make shared mobility more reliable, equitable, accessible, and sustainable than driving a car.
(**Shared mobility includes everything from public transportation to ride-hail, from car-sharing to on-demand responsive microtransit, from shared bikes and scooters to paratransit. It includes infrastructure safe sidewalks, protected bike lanes, complete streets, and mobility hubs. It includes digital and information systems. —and yes, IMHO, it includes informal transportation.)
We have close to 100 public, private, and nonprofit organizations that joined or said they would join the Action Network to get the Agenda done.
Drop a comment if you want to know more about it.
Words
Meanwhile, over here in the world of informal transportation.
I hope you caught Prof. Daniel Agbiboa’s excellent piece on seeing and understanding Lagos’ danfos through the subculture of danfo slogans.
(GPIT’s Pop Transport covered it in their last issue. Didn’t I tell you to subscribe to that newsletter, too?)
Daniel writes:
Danfo slogans are the public transcripts of the ‘unpeople’—the part who has no part, as the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, puts it. Pithy and wide-ranging, danfo slogans shape the mood and choice of commuters on a daily basis. They may express the operator’s gratitude to a family member who provided the down payment on the vehicle (Ola Egbon: ‘Brother’s Generosity’); they may remind people to show gratitude (‘Thank You Jesus. Have You Said It Today?’); they may reflect the operator’s supplication to God (‘Oh God! Do Not Be Silent!’; ‘No Loss, No Lack, No Limitation’); they may indicate an operator’s loyalty to a football club (‘Never Walk Alone’ [Liverpool]); they may convey a message or warning to visible and invisible enemies (‘Shut Up!’ or ‘Let Them Say’); they may celebrate the operator’s yearning for money (Owo-Lewa: ‘Money is beauty,’ or Ododo lowo: ‘Money is desirable’); they may represent the operator’s approach to business (‘Punctuality is the Soul of Business’); or relate to his personal philosophy— Life Na Jeje: ‘Life is Easy’ and No Lele: ‘Stay Vigilant’.
Daniel’s piece reminded me of what a western transport researcher once said that bothered me. She said, “the art and decoration (on informal transportation) doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make a difference.”
Perhaps it doesn’t “make a difference” for transportation planners. It probably doesn’t make transportation more efficient or safer, stick to a schedule or route, or arrive on time. It doesn’t figure in all the things that transportation planners value.
But I bet it does matter to the owner and the driver. I bet they value it. (They certainly spend money on it.)
It matters in the way identity matters. It personalizes and humanizes the vehicle.
I’d take a slogan-festooned danfo or gregariously painted diablo rojo any day over the stale uniformity of our modernist conceptions of what public transportation should look like.
Modernist systems of visual control depersonalize transportation; identify something by a number, including the driver. The vehicle and the driver are just cogs in the fantasy industrial clockwork of the “modern” city.
I admit there is a pleasure and legibility to the standard livery of city buses in the Global North. (Interrupted sometimes by money-making schemes for advertising dollars.)
But, the exuberant personalization of informal transportation gave birth to art forms (like Argentinean fileatado or Pakistani Truck Art) and music like Reggaeton.
Renato makes the first reggae en español hits and sells cassettes to commuters on tricked-out buses, known as diablos rojos, that are bumping and spreading the new sound.
IMHO, we betray our settler (colonialist) mentality when we look at the self-expression and personalization of makeshift mobility, dismiss it as irrelevant, and see no value.
In Prof. Agbiboa’s words, we’re “always looking at African cities through the eyes of the West. But what if we looked at African cities through their own eyes? Through the eyes of the danfo?”
When I was a teenager in Metro Manila, a pair of gorgeous jeepneys operated on my Sunday church route (Project 8 to San Andres). They were painted shiny black and decked out in chrome, chrome horses, and chrome sidings and flares, with eight-track “Quadrosonic stereo,” of course.
One was called “Black Beauty, “the other “Black Pogi.” (Pogi=tagalog for handsome.) Their names were emblazoned in fancy lettering on top and on side mud flaps that ran on each side of each jeep. They were a sight to behold, and catching them was a bit of a thrill.
Slogans matter. Danfos matter. Black Pogi matters. Makeshift mobility matters.
Btw, check out:
This piece by Tolu Ogunlesi on “the eccentric slogans and paintings on Lagos’ Molues, Danfos and Gwongworo vehicles.”
HipLatina on the whitewashing of Reggaeton’s roots.
More words
I did a couple of recordings that might interest you:
The Brake
Kea Wilson interviewed me for Episode 4 of The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast (“When Communities DIY Their Own Transit”). The episode is about 30 minutes.
Tune in for a fascinating conversation about tuktuks, matatus, jitneys, and everything in between, and what the world of informal transportation has to do with decolonizing our collective ideas about what transit can — and should — be. And don't forget to click over to Streetsblog to take a look at a few makeshift mobility vehicles for yourself.
Mobility Data
I recorded this presentation for the International Mobility Data Summit earlier this month. I talked about three questions techies should consider when they work on digitizing informal transportation: “Whose goals? Whose good? Whose problem?”
It’s about 14 minutes long, but I start with many ideas you are already familiar with in the first six minutes. Jump over to minute 6:29 to get to the core of my message.
Burying the lede
I’m putting this at the bottom of my letter to you. I think it partly explains why I haven't written to you much.
I was invited to write a book about informal transportation. (Yasss!!!)
The idea thrills me and terrifies me. (Would you be more thrilled or more scared in my shoes?)
The more I think about it, the more I know I have to do it. Of course, I HAVE to write the book. (And, of course, I worry if I have the discipline to get it done.)
Ugh.
Please keep your fingers crossed for me.
Maybe I’ll pick up the courage and get to the book by serializing it through my letters to you.
All for now. Next time, let’s talk about the myth of benevolent transportation AI.
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.