Paratransit transport drives the transport system in most emerging nations. It is essential to urban and rural movement. The informal transport system carries most people and is often more accessible, faster, ubiquitous, cheaper, and reliable, but it has also become environmentally unclean, rickety, unsafe, and oversupplied, causing traffic congestion, especially in cities. Due to their informal nature, informal public transport system improvements have failed. The research studied the possibility of bringing the on-demand internet business model to informal public transportation using Accra's paratransit as a case study. The report evaluated the unique nature, characteristics, potential and problems of the informal public transport eco-system and advocated activities that will meet the socio-economic and travel demands of all parties of the two-sided platform. Thus, adopting the on-demand internet business model in the informal public transport sector will not only address the paratransit service's supply-demand mismatch but also significantly reduce traffic congestion.
Top1.0 Introduction
Being able to move freely and at any time within the city is fundamental to a city’s liveability and productivity. In cities where the people cannot move easily around to access basic goods and services and are caught in perpetual cycle of crippling traffic congestion and weak public transport systems undermine the smart city concept of connectivity.
Most developing countries are reeling under the weight of the menace of informal public transport system i.e. paratransit. These Informal public transport (IPT) services made up of mini-vans, station wagons, taxis, and motorcycles ply their trade in almost every part of the country in developing countries. It is now known that building roads is not enough to wholly address the mobility challenges in the cities (2016).
The conventional approach in addressing the transportation challenges in developing countries had been to construct and expand roads for movement of cars and goods with little focus on how people travel. The mobility challenges in the city are further compounded by the proliferation of the informal transportation system or the paratransit system (mini-van popularly known in Ghana as “Tro-tro”) operators.
Although the Informal public transport, provide some important benefits to the society, such as on-demand access to medical clinics, jobs for low-skilled immigrant workers, and service coverage in areas without formal transportation (Cervero & Golub, 2011), they have become a major source of challenges such as heavy traffic, suffocating pollution of the air and noise and accidents that tend to derail and mitigate the efforts of city managers in modernizing their cities.
The Informal Public Transport (IPT) is characterized by low quality and over-supply of vehicles, low performance, poorly regulated and chaotic management. The extreme difficulty in bringing the Informal public transport under control in most developing countries and the lack of understanding of their cost-benefit nature have made some local authorities to give up in trying to do anything about them. However, considering the enormous contribution of the paratransit system to most economies of developing countries, it is imperative that every effort is made to maximize the positive externalities of their effects.
Virtually in all developing countries, the Informal public transport system account for a high disproportionate mode of travel compared to the formal public transportation system (Kashi & Carello, 2020). In the light of this, several attempts have been made (and continue to make) by governments and municipal city managers to address the menace created by the IPT. While some tackle this problem by banning and outlawing them, others have introduced regulations, laws, and new ways (technology based) with the view to formalizing and integrating their operations into the existing transportation system.
The Internet (Meera et al., 2019) has been recognised as one of the effective means in tackling urban mobility challenges globally (Lakhwani, Gianey, Wireko, & Hiran, 2020). Several studies conducted in recent times have shown how the Internet has had on the travel planning behaviour of people and hence has become a tool in addressing mobility and transportation challenges in the ever growing and expanding cities. (Andersson et al., 2018).
Moreover, few studies have been carried out on the enabling capability of the Internet in leveraging the operations and performance of the Informal Public Transportation (IPT) system especially in developing countries into the formal transportation space. Specifically, there are very few studies on how the Internet (Priyadarshi et al., 2021; Wireko et al., 2018) can be used to resolve the over-supply side of the informal public transport system and thereby creating traffic congestion and pollution and have subsequently become major socio-economic problems for many governments.
This study aims to fill this gap as it attempts to explore and analyze the potential application of the “on-demand business” model, which is based on the enabling capability of Internet (Aluvalu, 2020; Lakhwani, Gianey, Wireko, & Hiran, 2020) access in addressing the challenges posed by the Informal Public Transportation system in developing countries.