Contents

In this blog I want to explore how new information technologies are impacting or could impact informal transit in less developed cities from the global south. This fits into the “smart city” concept, which in my broader definition means to juxtapose new networks (usually communication and information networks) to existing systems.

Situating my reflections plays an important role in this work, so I’ll write about the context in which they appear: first I critically explore the definition of informal transport, after which I write about why should we care about improving informal transit in less developed cities, and which issues are to be addressed; then I elaborate on the smartness of informal transit situated in the relation between the smart city and the urbanizing global south.

After these general thoughts I explore the ways in which ICT could improve informal transport and present in 2 similar case studies how technologies were used for this end. These are considered good practices as they already tried to bring a more differentiated “bottom up” approach to this problem. I’m interested not only about their success and methodology but also about some shortcomings which can be identified.

This brings me to my hypothesis, in which I argue there could still be a another (parallel, not concurring) way of dealing with issues of informal transit, namely using technology to involve the transport users directly in process of service improvement.

Note: In the title I’m using the north-american term “informal transit” for “informal public transport” (or just “informal transport”, or sometimes “paratransit” although not the exact same meaning). It was the term most often used with the recent case studies here presented and want to build on those discussions.