Urban Informal Transport

Lima, as the capital of Peru, has become its first megacity with more than 10 million people in an area that extends over 80 km in a North-South direction. As a city of this size, it faces complex mobility issues with a strong reliance on informal transport modes (buses, minibuses, and paratransit vehicles) due to the deterioration of its transit system quality during the 20th century. This paper examines the current urban situation in Lima through an analysis of the city's structure, with an emphasis on its transport history and the resulting types of walking, transit, and car-oriented fabrics that can be identified. The mobility analysis was made through data collection, including daily trips by public and private modes, annual passenger kilometers and vehicle kilometers of travel, length of exclusive lanes for public transport and freeways, car and paratransit modes ownership, transport emissions, and safety. These data are used to position Lima in a comparative global context showing its relative strengths and weaknesses in urban form and mobility and providing suggestions for a more sustainable transport and land use system. It is asserted that Lima is an informal transit-oriented city, as distinct from recognized transit metropolises (e.g., Tokyo or German cities such as Berlin or Munich), which often involve private companies, operating under an umbrella of strong government regulation, fare setting, and high service standards. Lima is shown to have some important qualities such as a high density, comparatively low car ownership and freeway provision and still healthy levels of transit and non-motorized mode use despite non-ideal conditions for either. These qualities, if combined with effective governance structures, government commitment to higher quality formal transit systems, which better integrate the important informal transit sector, cessation of high capacity road building, greater protection and encouragement for non-motorized modes and some effective controls over growing car and motorcycle ownership, would see Lima develop a more sustainable transport system.

Traditionally, the provision of public transport is considered to be government's responsibility. Due to resource and capacity constraints in developing countries, however, government-provided public transport is often inadequate ; it is the privately operated public transport modes like shared auto-rickshaws, Vikrams, mini-buses, and Tata Magics, etc., that cater to the mobility needs of the population. This sector, however, is not sufficiently acknowledged for the important contribution that it makes toward mobility supply, in terms of both policymaking and city planning exercises. In addition, government authorities typically perceive these modes as unsafe, highly-polluting and a cause of traffic congestion as there is a complete absence of research and knowledge on these modes. To address this knowledge gap, an empirical study on informal public transport modes was undertaken in five cities/city regions of India. This paper presents the results of this research study, which provides a stronger understanding of the operational characteristics, roles, and contributions of these systems in meeting the mobility needs of the people. The paper also discusses commonly held perceptions of how these modes relate to safety and pollution. The paper highlights that these systems bridge a large transport supply gap and play an important role in Indian cities. The modes may follow some illegitimate practices, but they do it to become profitable, which in turn helps them provide the much-needed mobility services. The study also shows that these systems are not as unsafe and polluting as people often perceive them to be. However, there is significant room for improvements in terms of vehicle efficiency and compliance with regulatory provisions related to public transport.

Demand-responsive technology has long had theoretical potential in urban mobility (Jokinen, 2011), but the failure of microtransit companies in the US and UK should be noted as cautionary to the trial or implementation of demand-responsive services without adequate modelling. This paper attempts to produce a numerical model to the concept of "New Generation Services" outlined in the City of Cape Town MyCiti Business Plan 2018, or the "Hybrid Model" that has entered the current transport planning lexicon in South Africa since 2017. The authors aim to demonstrates a method for how detailed on-board survey data can be extrapolated and collated to prove the business case for minibus-taxi operators to shift from the current inefficient "load-and-go" operation to a more direct demand-responsive service. This paper presents a description of a methodology that is followed to capture test data, develop supply and demand models, run simulations and optimize the system to rationalize operations and business case for various operators. The numerical model is a demand and supply model, where the recommended fleet size is determined from the current passenger demand in the service network. In developing the demand and supply model, the data is obtained from onboard vehicle survey data. The model calculates total operating cost, revenue and carbon footprint of the current operations to the optimized and rationalized operations recommended in the model.