Give Matatu buses a chance

Two days ago, I posted a video about Matatu buses, Nairobi public transportations owned by private sector. If you have seen it, you might already know that Matatu buses had no system controlling or identifying the route, the schedule, the fare or even the bus stops. Therefore, getting in a wrong bus might be a nightmare for you.

Each Matatu is trying to be louder than the next, complete with graffiti-style artwork, custom designs, flashy lights and onboard entertainment to pull the crowds. Matatus are the choice mode of transport for most Kenyans. It is like a culture that roots deeply in Kenyan society, everyone once rides this public transportation. But recently, this culture may be under threat from government bans.

Here comes the hero to save Kenyan culture!

Seeing this problem and opportunity to improve Nairobi’s public transportation standard, Digital Matatus, researches from MIT Columbia University, and the University of Nairobi along with Groupshot, the design form, released the first non-formal transit system for the entire matatu system. They, then, collaborated with Google to create flexible transit networks with constantly changing schedules, routes and stops on Google Maps. Moreover, they contacted with General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) trying to come up with fixed times and schedules for Matatu. The tech community additionally invented five routing apps and one payment app that calculated actual ticket fares in order to deal with price fluctuation.

Matatu buses route map

But why? How come the country that has GDP per capita lower than USD$1,200 is able to be successful in this project?

The reason lies in the strength of mobile banking in Kenya. You may be surprised to know that Kenya is taking the lead in mobile banking in the world. Therefore, most of Nairobi people are using mobile phone in their daily life. This results into the lesser time for the project to gain awareness and for the people of Nairobi to take a trial. Moreover, by not inventing applications only for smartphones, but also old-school featured phones, this allows Nairobi people to widely access the applications and get benefits from them.

Nairobi is an amazing pilot test for other countries that are experiencing the same problem.

For example, Thailand is facing the same situation, but less serious than Nairobi. There are many privately-owned public transportations around Bangkok downtown and outskirts. Since the public transportation is covered only around 80% of Bangkok area and a number of public transportations are fewer comparing to the number of people who uses them, the public transportation owned by the private company can be complement in terms of the number and the places where the public transportation has not reached yet.

Public transportation owned by private in Bangkok

In the future, if the system is stable and the developers can gather enough data to estimate the demand of public transportation users during the day, this will help a government and private companies to plan more effective schedule and save their cost.