Indiana college student Wyclife Omondi likes to be punctual. But that’s a lot
That’s because of the Kenyan city’s bus system, which 70 percent of residents rely on to get around. The system, with its 15,000 minibuses — or matatus, as locals call them — is informal. Fares, routes and schedules change constantly, making the system unreliable and hard to navigate.
“Basically, it’s unpredictable,” said Omondi, 22, a senior at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. “You don’t know where the bus is, what time it will come and what time it will leave.”
That unreliability meant that Omondi almost missed his appointment at the U.S. Embassy to get his student visa. For others, it can mean wasting up to two hours every day waiting for a bus, Omondi said. Many times, riders get on a bus expecting to pay one fare, only to find that the conductor has hiked the price because he’s worried about not having enough passengers to make a profit.
“You end up spending so much of your income on matatus”, Omondi said.
Omondi has an opportunity to revolutionize how he and his fellow Nairobians get from point A to point B. He is the chief financial officer for the transportation start-up Magic Bus, which he co-founded with Earlham students Sonia Kabra, Leslie Ossete and Iman Cooper.
The team recently won the $1 million Hult Prize, a global entrepreneurship competition for students, which will help them reach that goal.
When the Hult Prize Foundation announced its 2016 challenge — to double the incomes of 10 million people living in crowded urban spaces in the world “through improved mobility and increased connectivity to people, products, services and capital by 2022” — they decided to work together to tackle the problem through transportation.
Using a simple offline text-messaging mobile app, commuters can book seats, buy tickets via mobile devices and check the fares, schedules and real-time locations of buses. Users text a code to get information about bus type, fare and estimated time of arrival. They then text another code to buy a digital ticket, which they show to the bus conductor when boarding.
For bus drivers, knowing how many passengers have purchased digital tickets means that they can start driving even if the bus isn’t full. The prevalence of mobile phones and the widespread use of mobile payments makes Kenya a perfect place to launch Magic Bus. The app is free.
“Almost everyone in Nairobi has a cellphone, and smartphone expansion is happening very rapidly,” said Jacqueline Klopp, an associate research scholar at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University who has worked on a project to digitally map Nairobi’s matatu routes.
“If the bulk of public transit are these minibuses, then we must find a way to leverage technology to improve these services,” Klopp said.rch scholar at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University who has worked on a project to digitally map Nairobi’s matatu routes.
Klopp said that a large percentage of the population in most African cities depends on public transportation.
Read more of the original article at The Washington Post
