#42 Are you a neocolonial transport planner?

An opinion piece with Dr. Jackie Klopp

Hey Friend,

I hope the Season is treating you well and that your holiday celebrations (if you celebrate any this time of year) were filled with the warmth of friends and family.

Welcome back to your now occasional newsletter on innovations in informal transportation. (I think my pace has dropped to every quarter of the year now. Sigh.)

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It’s popular

In case you missed it, you should definitely read Pop Transport’s latest release, “We’re calling it popular transportation.”

We're calling it popular transportation

Full disclosure, I was the primary author of the Agile City Partners document. You can still read the google doc here. You can comment and add your signature, if you agree.

Meanwhile, I’m sharing this piece I co-wrote with Dr. Jackie Klopp. Dr. Klopp is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD) at Columbia University’s Climate School. Her work focuses on the politics, governance, and policy around pathways to safer, low-emission, equitable transport, land use, and access. She’s a founding member of the award-winning DigitalMatatus consortium and new collaborative platforms on open transit data for African and Latin American cities, DigitalTransport4Africa, and DATUM. 

We wrote this after a series of conversations in Dakar, where she chaired the annual meeting of DigitalTransport4Africa. We will plan to rewrite it for a mainstream publication and take a more positive tone (e.g., ”How NOT to be a neocolonial transport planner”).

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Ten signs you are a neocolonial transport planner

The imperative to fight climate change is bringing new energy and global attention to how we get around in our towns and cities. According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) and the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (Irena) Breakthrough Agenda Report 2022, “Transport has the highest level of reliance on fossil fuels of any sector today, which supply about 95% of its final energy demand. It accounts for more than 20% of global energy-related direct CO2 emissions, and produces a significant share of air pollution and related threats to public health.” (The report also says road transport sector emissions “need to fall by nearly a 1/3 by 2030.”)

Despite the “avoid, shift and improve” paradigm for addressing transport problems, most attention is on large-scale mass transit projects. More recently, electrification has taken center stage, with billions of dollars set aside by multi-lateral development banks, philanthropic coalitions, and national governments to replace ICE fleets. As these resources are made available to low and medium-income countries, they invariably are accompanied by planning and consulting contracts. A legion of transportation experts and consultants then descend on the cities and towns of the Global South. They are an “army of experts” deployed to “solve” local urban transportation problems that nevertheless have global ramifications.

Decarbonizing and improving public transportation are laudable goals. Still, there are dangers in the current approach that tends towards transplanting pre-packaged solutions, whether BRT or electric busses dropped into complex existing urban transport systems that rely on varied popular transport modes. Poorly done, solutions imported ex-nihilo on geographies viewed as terra nullius, with popular transport systems erased or ignored, can present neocolonial dynamics that only strengthen or create new power imbalances and dysfunctional dependencies. They can also displace people and decimate livelihoods and businesses that are part of popular transport ecosystems with deep histories and roots.

Solutions proposed with missionary zeal on communities that are not consulted, in denial of existing popular/informal/artisanal transportation networks, can do more damage and create more problems for the people we want to serve. It is, in a word, inequitable and, in fact, neo-colonial.

If you or your organization is tapped to deliver on transportation improvement, including decarbonization projects, be wary of becoming a neo-colonial transport planner. Here’s a quick checklist.

You are a neocolonial transportation planner if:

1. You feel you have a High Mission that justifies all your prescriptions. It could be to Modernize and Make Efficient or Electrify and Decarbonize local transportation. It could be both. (This is the Manifest Destiny of transportation planners.)

2. You think what is already operating on the ground is chaotic and “ungovernable” although you know very little about it. 

3. You are ready with a pre-determined solution—BRT, rail, subway, EV buses, MaaS, gondolas, or HYPErloop—and you believe your prescription is “modern” and more “advanced” transportation.

4. You are convinced of the logic of replacing what’s already there because “people deserve better-managed transportation.” 

5. You believe you are working to improve things, to bring more efficient systems to these poor people who suffer “backward” and “fragmented” transportation systems.

6. You don’t take the time to fully understand the system that is already operating, especially what makes it work and what people who use it think and want. [Emphasis added.]

   1. You lack data but don’t know it, or you know you lack data but don’t bother to collect it.

   2. You don’t ask people what they like about the existing system—an asset frame. Instead, you state what is wrong with it and only use a problem frame.

   3. You don’t take the time to understand the social, cultural, and entrepreneurial components of the existing systems.

   4. You don’t know how many jobs or families are supported by the current system.

   5. You don’t consult with, talk to, and, more importantly, listen to the workers running the current system/s. (You leave that to the local project proponents.)

7. You want to import whole systems - BRT or rail - that will “solve” the “problem” of local mobility and often prefer foreign companies to run the new services.

   1. You don’t care if these new systems wind up displacing the current services (since they are “problems”) or don’t care if existing workers lose their livelihoods.

   2. You’re okay with government debt and loans for the new, imported (and imposed) systems but don’t think current systems are worthy investments.

   3. You don’t care if the new system you bring in is extractive. You’re okay with contracts that guarantee income for the winning project bid operators even if they don’t hit ridership goals or improve overall access much.

   4. You don’t care what happens to passengers once they leave your transport solution, so NMT and integrated multi-modal networks belong to other people to solve.

8. You have one-dimensional performance metrics -e.g., “Travel time saved in a corridor” and don’t bother to measure economic, health, cultural and social impacts. Apart from your core demographic of passengers (primarily working men heading to factories or downtown offices), you are oblivious to the varied travel patterns of different groups, especially women, minorities, the poor, and other marginalized people. (See #6a above.)

9. You think people losing their jobs and businesses are necessary “collateral damage” to bringing order and efficiency to the system.

10. You don’t think the people and systems already operating transportation services can deliver better services and improve their operations.

Feel free to post this on your agency’s bulletin board or pin it at the top of your company slack or chat channel. Discuss it in transportation class and bring it to conferences. 

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That’s it for now. Happy New Year!

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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.