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The city streets of developing countries are characterised by small, private, commercial vehicles that make up the informal transport sector. Although they vary in name and mode — three-wheeler tuk tuks in Sri Lanka, matatu minibuses in Kenya and okadu motorcycles in Nigeria — they all provide vital mobility services while simultaneously deepening some of the worst side-effects of urban transportation.
At the beginning of this year, the Nigerian state government announced a ban on commercial motorcycles and tricycles in Lagos, Africa’s largest mega-city. In a desperate bid to ease the city’s grinding urban congestion, officials outlawed the ubiquitous for-hire motorbikes known as okadas in major residential and business hubs, leaving millions of residents effectively immobile.
According to a recent piece by Quartz, the problem is that “existing state-owned bus and ferry transport services alongside private operators of commercial transport buses cannot cater to the transport needs of the city’s 21 million residents.”
This seems to represent a defining challenge for the types of dense, sprawling and highly-populated urban centres that are emerging as world cities in the 21st century. Populations have skyrocketed, leaving public transit or private car ownership in their shadow, and consequently, different forms of informal mobility economies have become vital services for people.
But cities that rely on informal transport are typically “plagued with mobility problems,” from road congestion and air pollution to dangerous road conditions and corrupt transport governance.
“Informal transport performs a critical function in developing nations, often providing mass mobility and, as such, is usually tolerated by public officials,” says Leigh Glover, former Director of the Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport. But cities that rely on informal transport are typically “plagued with mobility problems,” from road congestion and air pollution to dangerous road conditions and corrupt transport governance.
The real challenge of informal transport, says Glover, is that all these factors “interact to produce a system that may appear chaotic, but within this chaos is a stability that prevents the development of superior arrangements for improved passenger mobility.” In effect, this ends up “undermining public transport in developing nations with cheaper fares and direct services, making the task of public transport more difficult.”
