Speaker: Jacqueline M. Klopp, Associate Research Scholar, Center for Sustainable Urban Development, Earth Institute
As Africa continues to urbanize rapidly and car ownership increases, its cities are facing the familiar problems of massive congestion, air pollution and crashes. Growing urban transportation emissions are also contributing to climate change which adds more vulnerability and risk. The fact that the vast majority of citizens living in African cities use public transport presents an opportunity to address these serious problems through high quality public transport reform. Yet transportation investments in these cities tend towards infrastructure for cars, especially highways. More recently, a trend towards bus rapid transit as a form of public transport reform has emerged, often entailing displacing and replacing existing public transport which predominantly consists of minibus systems with flexible schedules, stops and routes. This sets up a contentious politics around critical public transport reform that demands more attention as a major stumbling block to improving public transport in African cities.
Currently, transportation investment and infrastructure development are taking place without adequate public transport data exacerbating politics and making more holistic planning difficult. Drawing on work from Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Cairo, eThekwini, and Cape Town, this talk provides an overview of this critical but contentious politics around transforming public transport in African cities. It explores how by using GPS enabled cellphones, the collection and analysis of public transport network data, along with public dialogue, can contribute to improved transportation planning, policy and services. In particular, one promising approach to reform entails using negotiation, incentives and new data and technologies, to go beyond punitive regulations on minibus systems to improve and integrate them better into formal public transport networks. Given analysis showing minibus systems provide the bulk of critical access to services and opportunities for the majority in these cities, such an approach is more politically viable and also equitable. Overall, which policy and planning directions these cities take may lock in either more virtuous or more problematic pathways for the continent, with wider implications for the planet.
