Informal Transportation Testing

When public transit is entirely run by the private market, the role of transportation planners shifts. Community outreach and route planning are coordinated with subsidies and negotiations with operator organizations. In pursuit of equity, profits remain top-of-mind.

How much subsidy does it take to make a route viable? A pilot project aimed to estimate the scale, cost, and timeline for creating a more equitable minibus route.

In "Creating an Informal Transport Route: Implications for Mobility, Gender, and Planning Processes" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 90, No. 4) Tamara Kerzhner conducted a pilot project that created a new route within the informal transport network in Kampala, Uganda.

Subsidies To Profit

The three-week, subsidy-driven experiment led to an independently operating and profitable service. The test route provided a cross-city connection that bypassed the city center, avoiding lengthy traffic jams and reducing transfers.

It was disproportionately used by women with informal, low-income jobs. Women preferred minibus to motorcycles, finding the minibus better for traveling with goods and more dependable due to its fixed route. This pilot project resulted in a seven percent increase in revenues for participating operators. The total cost of subsidies was about $7,000.

Providing operators a subsidy to follow the new route removed the risk of failing to make the daily target payment. This flexibility allowed drivers to adapt, change destinations, and negotiate with passengers. Such adaptability was not the norm on established routes in Kampala, where operations are usually rigid, especially during peak times.

Figure 2: Existing minibus routes (dotted lines) and the new route developed by the project (heavy black line). Most routes converged on the Taxi Park. Source of routes: Transport for Cairo et al., 2020 Map by author.

Off the Beaten Path

Transportation operators in Kampala do not receive support from state or city authorities. They follow well-established, densely populated routes that are profitable.

The urban periphery is less served, leaving many lower-income neighborhoods without access to reliable transportation. Even if a stop is near a neighborhood, not all residents have equal access due to factors such as schedule and safety issues.

Kerzhner highlights that women in Kampala travel differently. Women tend to travel outside of peak rush hours and require more stops to provide care through shopping, hospital visits, and community activities. Compared to suburban-to-downtown work commutes, existing routes did not accommodate women's complex trips.

"Before, the experience was really bad...the boda [motorcycle] would tell you he already has an appointment to take someone else. You would be patient to wait for another only to say the same thing. You wait but in vain. Additionally, those bodas have so much pride. They ask 5,000 to 7,000 shillings [$1.5–$2], yet you also don't have the money, and the business you have can't pay rent, transport, school fees, food. In the end, you feel bad about it. Even if you plead to them to take you at a reduced cost, they arrogantly respond. It hurts me so much...When we boarded the taxi, everyone was happy that bodas will no longer be riding with them on the bumpy roads. When we got the taxi, we traveled happily. If there was someone to record us during that moment, you would have heard how women were happy."

— Interview with a passenger

Figure 4: Left: Hand-drawn map of the route made by operators. Right: Leaflet and map of the route created by researchers and distributed to passengers.

Experimental Planning

These findings encourage incentivizing route formation to support more equitable mobility. The methods are potentially applicable in any market-based mass transit system.

This approach maintained the social and economic structure for drivers and passengers without requiring new institutions or long-term funding streams. Neither the drivers nor the research team had to assume long-term commitments or risks.

Planners can identify potentially profitable but underserved areas and provide limited-time subsidies to test the route. Some locations will fail, as sections of this test route did, but low-cost seed funding can prompt long-term equitable results.

Through participatory design and pilot projects, cities can target incentives to expand transportation networks in underserved areas. More radically, operators and communities themselves could propose a range of locations to better serve, and cities could offer support to test them.

The author shows how to effectively test planning policy in informal markets, demonstrating the power of experimentation in urban planning.

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