Bringing Transit to Nairobi's Streets | Hacker News Reader

Bringing Transit to Nairobi's Streets

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46 pointssamvermette10 comments

I lived in Nairobi for the summer of 2004 (in Buru Buru for half the time and then in Kibera on the map) and I would have loved to have this information at the time. Taking the matatu into town was always a fun experience. I came just after they implemented strict laws that limited passengers to the number of seatbelts. This opened up business for a lot more matatu operators but congested the roads. Before there may be double the number of people per matatu standing or hanging off the sides.

It was incredible to me how each matatu basically had its own personality. Some would be quiet like riding on a normal bus in North America. But then you would have the party matatus that would be fully painted and blasting out music at 9am in the morning and the tout would be lauging and joking with all the passengers or singing.

I was on an exchange program and stayed with host families. While waiting for matutus to take us into town, even though there were so many, they basically recognized all of them. I would say, "What about this one?" and they would say that it was going somewhere else or that you can't trust them.

At night, when coming home there was usually a 30-60 minute lineup just to get on one and then it could take another 60 minutes to get home when the normal time was just 20 minutes.

> It was incredible to me how each matatu basically had its own personality. Some would be quiet like riding on a normal bus in North America. But then you would have the party matatus that would be fully painted and blasting out music at 9am in the morning and the tout would be lauging and joking with all the passengers or singing.

I wonder... Aggregating this data and presenting it in a single app is tremendously valuable but does it also preserve knowledge about these forms of "local color"?

Can I see which routes are party buses, and which have quiet (and wifi)? Can I review them and keep track of which ones are sketchy, or clean, or have bad drivers, or are newer vehicles?

You could argue any transit system should let your rank and favorite routes, though the difference in quality between one route and another is not normally that significant on first-world single-operator systems. Although every major city usually has at least one locally-infamous nightmare route...

Matatus _always_ have route markers, in your case, 23 for Buru Buru. There's no magic to it.

Matatus going to Buru Buru have traditionally been marked as route # 58. Number 23 goes to Bahati and Jericho, Jerusalem up to utmost Buru Buru phase II, then take Outering road to "Civil Servants". I live in Nairobi :)

Buru Buru Ph. II in Buru Buru ;-) The tone of the article rubbed me the wrong way, had a bit of that "White guy who discovered Mt. Kenya" vibe. I may have unfairly read some of that into the parent comment. Well aware of 58 as well.

That was my problem with it too.

I think saying that cars are limited to the citys elites is overstating the case a bit. There are quite a few middle class families with cars. The problem is twofold

1: The collapse of the public bus system (KBS or Kenya Bus Service) in the early 90s 2: The lack of any investment in infrastructure since at least the 70s. There are a bunch of reasons (IMF structural adjustment, corruption, poor planning etc)

I'm kenyan and remember that in the 80s it was relatively quick for me to get to downtown Nairobi, or to School (for anyone who knows Nairobi, I was commuting from South B to Nairobi Primary School). I could either have my parents drop me (they worekd in the CBD and drove there), take a bus to downtown Nairobi and walk to school from there or take another bus to school (I used to opt to walk the 2nd leg and buy these really terrible SciFi books 'Perry Rhodhan' that were translated to English from German, but thats another story...).

In 1980, the bus/matatu ride from South B to Downtown Nairobi (near Standard Chatered bank) took about 10-12 minutes. The last time I did this (in 2010, I needed to get from South B to the National Archives in the CBD so I hopped a #11 Matatu), it took 2 hours, and that was not in rush hour traffic. I could have gotten out and walked there faster (and regularly used to do so in the 80s, but everything is fenced off and over-built). The next day I drove with my mum and same thing (South B to Kariokor), there is literally no way of avoiding spending a large amount of your life sitting in traffic, and it boggles my mind that there are cities that are worse (i.e mexico City)

There are simply too many cars for the infrastructure. And in a really bone-headed move, some time ago the government decided to solve this problem by banning public service vehicles (buses and matatus) from the Central Business District, but private cars were allowed. Of course this was so the rich could travel un-impeded. The plan didn't last due to the outcry, but that shows you the priorities of the politicians.

But if it meets its promise, this app would be truly amazing and useful. And the name (Hakuna Matatu), you have to understand Swahili to appreciate the pure awesomeness of that pun.

Human Transit had a great guest post on transit Lusaka, Zambia:

http://www.humantransit.org/2013/08/guest-post-on-lusaka-tra...

I remember this post because it outlined the limitations of informal, privately operated systems: They tend to have physically centralized hubs that are overserved, because the operators can guarantee customers at those stops, while outlying regions are missing direct connections - all routes go downtown, is the rule.

It seems rather counter-intuitive that a city with no formal transit, and thus no actual schedules could be meaningfully integrated in a scheduling app. But I guess the matatu drivers have to follow pretty fixed routes because they have to follow the expectation of their users. That is, their pre-existing knowledge about where the buses go.

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