Class Notes 14

Transportation and Society with special reference to Africa
Class notes 14

Week 14: Conclusion: Information technology and community participation in transport service design

In this final class, our purpose is to look forward to the future for the planning of transport service design in Africa. We have taken a journey over the last fourteen weeks which has demonstrated the extent to which decision making processes around the transportation and communication structures of Africa have by-passed local communities, most particularly in respect of the provision and development of infrastructure.

At the same time as large infrastructure decisions were either directly controlled by authorities external to Africa or heavily influenced by agencies external to Africa, the provision of local transport services by a vibrant informal sector is a marked characteristic of Africa's transport environment. This vibrant informal transport sector services many African urban neighbourhoods and communities relatively well - although we have noted over the weeks the historic legacy of stranded mobility experienced by south african townships as a consequence of the planning policies of apartheid - but often does not service the rural areas adequately or at all (see http://www.worldbank.org/afr/ssatp/rttp/2_6mobility.htm).

Information technology can be used to improve the quality of transport available to rural areas: information communication technology can be used to better organise national vehicle fleets, public, private and community vehicles, to fully utilise capacity and extend services to rural area. The schedule matching and brokering of spare capacity in a national vehicle fleet, or some significant part of it, on an instantaneous basis is a new technical capability: and this capability has the greatest value in a context where resources are scarce and those resources which exist are not fully utilised due to imperfections in information.

There is no doubt that "planning" in Africa has taken place upon an inadequate information basis and indeed upon an inadequate participation basis:

One of the most significant problems in addressing urbanization issues and in assessing the performance of urban management systems in Africa is the dearth of information. The reasons for this lack of data and the unreliability of information that does exist are well known: economic deterioration has reduced the resources for research and data collection (Stren, 1994); economic difficulties combined with political turmoil have reduced the capacity of governments to lead development and ensure that administrative procedures are adhered to; war and civil unrest have prevented or invalidated data collection; and a combination of overcentralization and an emphasis on rural development has led to a weakening of city-based administration.

In effect, in Africa, we have to study urbanization in the absence of reliable and up-to-date demographic information and in the face of enormous gaps in the research that has been carried out. How, it might be asked, is it possible to understand the dynamics of urbanization when it is not known what proportion of the population is living in urban areas, what the population of many cities is, and what has happened to rates of natural increase and patterns of migration during the 1980s and early 1990s? Although there was a round of censuses in many countries around 1990, few have managed to process and make available the results in a suitably disaggregated fashion. To fill the gap, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements is attempting to collect city-level information. However, this information was not available in time for use by the researchers reporting here. Nevertheless, the urgent need to improve our understanding of the dynamics of urbanization and of the outcomes of attempts to manage urban growth means that we must proceed, by assembling what data are available, drawing on personal experience, and reaching conclusions with care. Edited)Rakodi, C. (1997)The urban challenge in Africa: Growth and management of its large cities.The United Nations University @ http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu26ue/uu26ue00.htm#Contents

New information technology offers low cost mechanisms for the collection of accurate information with the added benefit that new information technologies contain important new potential for extending the participation of users in the decision process( see http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/ECA/eca_plnrs6.html).

The colonial and imperial history of Africa produced an institutional environment in which community consultation on public service development and delivery was weak: current concerns with the development of civil society as a pathway to progress have led to a focus on participation but thinking on precisely how such participation is to be delivered remains relatively weak.

Last week we saw that whilst there is a recognition of the importance of extending Information Communication Technology to the rural areas of Africa at the level of demonstration projects, we have not yet seen the launching of a systematic program of rural communications upgrading to enable the new information efficiencies and participative potentials to be harnessed. Low cost solar powered satellite linked miniaturised technologies offer a path to community participation in transport service organisation as well as to access to the other key areas of civic participation (see http://www.itdg.org/html/itdg_eastafrica/kit_jun_03_aims.htm; see also http://www.gpswaypoints.co.za/HPG_homepage.asp for GPS commercial developments in South Africa). The communications impoverishment of Africa has had negative consequences which are universally recognised: given the policy opportunities which exist to remove the 'digital divide' and the information poverty of Africa, preventing a digital divide which compounds and intensifies the sequence of 'divides' (power, transport, communications)which have excluded Africa from global and regional opportunity becomes a critical issue.

Ensuring the availability of the technologies for maximising the use of spare capacity in scarce resources would constitute "an appropriate transfer": applying low cost information technology solutions to the coordination of bush taxis represents one obvious step that can be explored and seems to have fallen below the development improvement radar. New information gathering and participative decision making technologies are critical for accessibility planning in both the developed and developing world: but it is in the developing world that they can, perhaps, make the greatest of change.

21st century transportation must be inclusive in service, leaving no one behind

http://www.dot.gov/affairs/101000sp.htm

References:
Edited)Rakodi, C. (1997)The urban challenge in Africa: Growth and management of its large cities.The United Nations University @ http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu26ue/uu26ue00.htm#Contents

Demand responsive transport and Africa - bush taxis http://www.modulobus.org/josselin/articles/agile-josselin.pdf

For an image of a bush taxi see http://www.yaderhey.com/mikemanske/photos2_4.html

Rural communication technology check list http://www.dosite.jp/e/io/org_apt_rural.html

Prepared by Margaret Grieco, Professor of Transport and Society, Transport Research Institute, Edinburgh and Visiting Professor, Institute for African Development, Cornell University. http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society

e-mail at m.grieco@napier.ac.uk