Benjamin de la Peña, CEO of the Chicago-based Shared Use Mobility Center and chair of the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation, calls himself a “transport nerd”. This is one of the first things he said when we initially spoke by Zoom in the middle of 2022, the big smile on his face perfectly framed on the screen in front of me. A month later, we continued our Zoom conversation. It was early morning in Chicago and, coffee in hand, he was bracing himself for a busy day. Between our two meetings, de la Peña had directed me to Makeshift Mobility. The “occasional newsletter” on informal transportation that he produced until the end of 2022, it was, he had promised, the place to go to understand the depth of his nerdiness and breadth of his interests in transportation matters. 

And so it was.

“[They] come by many names: matatus, tro tro, camionetas, colectivos, jeepneys, autorickshaws, trisikads, minibuses, mega taxis, tuk-tuks, okadas, moto-dubs, etc.,” he wrote in the newsletter’s inaugural edition in 2021. “Two wheels, three wheels or four; human powered or engine powered—informal transportation very likely moves and employs more people than all the city trains, buses and taxis around the world. They provide mobility and livelihoods for mostly low-income and the poor,” he concluded. Elsewhere in the post, he invited transportation geeks, policy wonks and anyone who loves cities and is looking for “ethical, just and sustainable innovations” to subscribe. 

Uncharacteristically, I signed on, breaking a cathartic, weeks-long mission to unsubscribe to the nearly-hundred digital newsletters cluttering my inbox each month. The purge had been successful, and I was determined not to be subscribed to more than five carefully chosen newsletters. So, a newsletter championing informal transport—often seen as a pariah—was refreshing.

By the time I was watching de la Peña drink his coffee in Chicago, I had devoured much of the newsletter and had an inkling of the seemingly boundless enthusiasm that he brings to all things transport. His interests span from technology, innovation and research aspects, to policies and business models around large-scale and (mostly) “informal” transport systems. While he uses that word—in his talks, writings and multiple times in our conversation—he professes having a massive problem with it. 

“That term is inadequate. It’s defining something by what it’s not,” de la Peña declares. “If you consider it,” he continues, “it leads you to ask, ‘What is formal transportation?’ Because that is the only way to define ‘informal transportation’. The best definition I’ve come across is from a colleague in Lima who said instead of ‘formal’, calling it ‘institutional transportation’ is more apt. It recognises that there’s a big institution behind it—be it a private company with a large contract or the government itself. ‘Institutional’ denotes that it’s a very structured system, either fixed rail or buses,” he says animatedly.

Adding to this argument, de la Peña notes that a standard global term that truly defines what informal transport is or means does not exist. “Some sectors like calling it paratransit,” he says, a term that confuses North Americans, particularly in the US, where “paratransit” refers to publicly provided transportation for those with disabilities. 

For de la Peña, Columbia University academic Dr Jacqueline Klopp’s term “popular transport” comes closest to capturing the essence of what we generally call informal transport. “By ‘popular’, she means it’s widely used and is for the people,” he says, alluding to the fact that where dominant, informal transportation is the primary mode of mobility for 70 to 80% of the population it serves. Our lack of an actual term for what is not municipally or institutionally provided transportation points to a blind spot. Words matter, and what you call and how you define the system determines its place in the imagination and how it’s valued. “In our work as the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation, we’re trying to define this clearly, not only for researchers on this topic or the authorities and policymakers who are deciding how to regulate or invest in this space. We are trying to clearly define it for those who use these systems daily, so they can also view them for the value they bring and not just as poorer alternatives to the more formal, large-scale systems.”

De la Peña was born and grew up in Manila, Philippines, and moved to the US for his graduate studies in Urban Planning at Harvard University in 2002. From an early age, he was intensely aware of how the city moves.
“I grew up in Manila, a city with three urban rail lines.
It was all jeepneys and buses, with a brief period during which a municipal, nationally owned bus service that quickly collapsed was established. After the service’s demise, almost all public transport across the city became informal,” he says. Compounding factors—including corruption in Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship and its adoption of neoliberal economic policies—pushed the government into shedding all public transportation investment, instead handing it over to private providers. “That didn’t just happen in Metro Manila; it happened in many global South cities,” he adds. Those policies, imposed on multiple countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, led to an accelerated decline of whatever institutional public transport systems were in place, in turn leading to the proliferation of the popular ones we see today. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Underinvestment in public systems wasn’t limited to cities across the global South, though. After graduation, de la Peña did stints in multiple American cities—Washington DC, Baltimore, New York, Miami and Seattle—where he worked for those cities’ transportation departments. He remembers the stark differences in each city’s public transport system. While several of those cities have some reasonably robust legacy transportation systems, such as the New York City Subway, many never made the same level of investment. To this day, Miami doesn’t have much in terms of rail but has a bus network in place, while Seattle only recently began to build out its fixed commuter rail system after having relied on buses and private cars for decades.

By contrast, Chicago has the third most extensive urban rail network in the US. “In certain cities across the US, you have large transportation organisations, many multi-layered, providing public transportation services. In a city like Manila, there is none. While there’s a national agency, no metro-level transportation agency exists. That lack of institutional capacity is one of the biggest differences and has a large bearing on the type of investments made,” de la Peña says. 

Some of these investments have come in the form of what has become generally known as the ubiquitous “transit-oriented development” (TOD). Look through any city’s development literature: TOD will likely be a key strategy. Succinctly defined, it’s a strategy focused on “creating compact, walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income communities centred around high-quality public transportation”, according to the World Resources Institute. De la Peña is quick to point out that to understand TOD, one has to start from its origin. 

“That term came from North America,” he says. “North American cities—particularly in the US—do not have adequate public transportation. In their planning, most of the cities are zoned and planned around people using cars and in ways that result in urban sprawl. This makes it difficult to support viable public transportation systems. So,” he continues, “TOD was conceived out of the need to create greater population density in these cities, boosted by and around transportation services to incentivise residents to use public transportation instead of private vehicles.” 

The situation in the majority of global South cities is different. For example, if you are in places like Delhi, Lagos, Jakarta or Johannesburg, all you need to do is step out onto the street, and there will be an autorickshaw, danfo, ojek, or taxi. De la Peña argues that for most of the global South, therefore, transportation, which is “informal”, is very close and easily accessible. There might be questions about improving those services, but they are available. The exception being affluent neighbourhoods, which follow an uncannily American logic: everyone has a car. 

“Transit-oriented development,” he says, “is for cities that developed around the car, which we now know is not sustainable. These cities are trying to re-orient their development around transportation hubs, mostly as some fixed rail system.” In many ways, it’s an attempt to replicate what cities like Tokyo or Seoul—which both have very dense nodes around their transportation, train, and subway stations—achieved post-war. You essentially martial and incentivise large-scale real estate development investment and use that to pay for the transportation services. 

Thus the big push to bring the TOD approach to cities across the global South completely ignores the fact that, unlike in the US cities where the idea originated, transportation is already available—sometimes just outside your door. “So we need to ask why we are focusing investment into these fixed rail systems but not the existing minibus taxis, colectivos, tro tro, or matatus? That’s the big question,” de la Peña says.

“Scale, perhaps?” I try.

“The truth is,” he says sharply, “transportation experts and leaders generally look down on these systems as backward and anti-modern. But the truth is they are part of the lifeblood of these places and will never be going away. They will improve, but they will not go away.”

To illustrate, de la Peña tells me of what happened in Delhi. “In the early aughts, the city commissioned and built an eight-line metro system, which by all accounts was a very successful construction project,” he says. When the Red Line, which was the first to be completed, was ready, then-Chief Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared that because of this modern system, autorickshaws could be abandoned. “There was a problem—half of Delhi’s population could not afford the train fare. Eighty percent of the population continued to use autorickshaws largely because the fixed rail doesn’t reach everything, and autorickshaws do. To this day, they remain.” 

It’s a common trend. In cities with formal (institutional), high-investment transportation, and informal (popular) systems, the informal system almost always serves more people. According to a University College London study, in Mexico City 76% of all public and shared transportation trips happen through the colectivos, despite the city having a good bus rapid transit (BRT) system. Medellín and other cities experience the same phenomenon. The formal transportation systems never entirely manage to mirror the fluidity of informal neighbourhoods and the economies that thrive in them, so people are more drawn to the popular transport systems that are better adapted to their day-to-day travel. 

“So, we look down on these systems because we have biases, and our biases are built up by an urban imaginary completely defined by what’s going on in the West,” de la Peña says. “Suppose you accepted ‘informal’ systems as providers of valid transportation rather than viewing them as problems? In that case, you’d have to question whether TOD is a good or necessary strategy for many cities across the South.”

I press him further on my question about scale as the reason for needing mass transit systems, and he agrees—with a caveat.

“We do need the mass transit systems, just for efficiency’s sake, but we need to make those more efficient,” he says. People use informal transportation where it’s available because, typically, any trip would be a one-seat ride for them, even if it may take longer. Because fixed rail and some of these bus systems tend to operate in fixed corridors that can’t reach everywhere, informal transportation is still needed. What advocates for BRT want to do is make informal operators a last-mile service. Still, informal transit can be very dynamic, so the operators will often develop a faster, cheaper and more direct route that users prefer. This upsets how the rigid formal system is organised. Each city’s informal system has a very particular set of indigenous quirks, and there has to be a conscious effort and investment to adapt and match that rather than, as a default, trying to change it completely. 

“In Cape Town, South Africa, for instance, the city authority realised in planning its BRT system that stations needed to be 500m apart to be viable. But that’s too few stops in many parts of that city. The reason is that it’s unsafe for women to walk those distances alone at night, so they prefer to use minibus taxis, which drop passengers off exactly where they need to jump off. 

“We need to decolonise transportation,” he adds emphatically. “Colonialism is looking at an existing place, system or set of values and concluding there’s nothing of value there, then beginning to bring in some external, foreign system—a new form of government, economic system or whatever—because nothing on the ground in your view is of value and [it all] needs to be discarded and replaced. That’s what tends to happen with these new transport systems being introduced across multiple cities. Their promoters and investors see the organic systems that exist and define them as a problem. Then they bring in ‘solutions’ which almost universally aren’t working and, in many cases, are failing. That is because in implementing and planning these systems, they fail to fully understand the needs of the people using these informal, more organic transportation systems.

“Lastly,” de la Peña says, “one of the things you must ask first when you look at these new systems is whom they exclude and how they are excluded. A favourite quotation of mine is from Slum Dwellers International. They say: ‘The first act of inclusion is to be counted.’ In our quest to ‘improve’ informal transportation, we sometimes don’t even count, for example, the number of matatus, tro tro, camionetas, colectivos, jeepneys, autorickshaws, trisikads, minibuses, mega taxis, tuk-tuks, okadas, moto-dubs that might be operating in an area so that we understand them more, and also whom they serve. If we are going to figure out what transportation is supposed to look like truly, we have to.”

An alarm chimed not long after, and we were done. Modernity was calling.