Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the City, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations. I am your host, Tamla Shimizu, and I hope you'll enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life. So we are live here in Madrid, Spain, and thanks to our partnership with Global Mobility Call BABLE has had the privilege of inviting international speakers to participate in dynamic keynotes and engaging roundtables. And as part of this collaboration, we're also recording several podcast episodes with some of those international speakers. So a big thank you to Global Mobility Call for making this all possible. In this episode, we will discuss shared mobility and popular transportation, a topic central to achieving affordable, equitable and environmentally sound mobility for all. So if that sounds interesting for you, stick around. I'd like to introduce you to a very special guest today. First, his name is Benjamin de la Peña. As CEO of the Shared Use Mobility Center, a US based public interest organization, he also chairs the Global Network for Popular Transportation and served as chief of strategy and innovation for the Seattle Department of Transportation. Welcome, Benjie.
[00:01:23] Benjamin de la Peña: Thank you. I'm glad to be here, Tamlyn.
[00:01:24] Tamlyn Shimizu: I'm really glad to have you. I'm really interested to get all of your thoughts. We haven't talked too much about your line of work yet, so I'm really, really interested to dig into these topics with you. Sure. Before we get started with the digging in, we like to get a little warmed up first with a bit of a teaser question. And so the teaser I have for you today is if you had to describe your work at the Shared Use Mobility center with only three emojis, which emojis would you use?
[00:01:54] Benjamin de la Peña: This is not my generation. I am Gen X and I'm not millennial or Gen X. I asked it.
[00:01:58] Tamlyn Shimizu: To a boomer yesterday and he said, oh, this is boomer. I said, well, you have to do more than just a smiley, but I feel confident.
[00:02:04] Benjamin de la Peña: Oh man, you just took out one of these.
I would say thumbs up.
Right. Because it's a lot of encouragement.
I would say the critical eye.
Right. Because it's like looking at what's happening and trying to figure out in a critical way and figuring out what works and yet at the same time approving things that work.
And then I guess the celebration emoji. Right. Because you celebrate wins. Or I would. It's either that or the mountain climbing emoji.
[00:02:38] Tamlyn Shimizu: So it's what, the challenge or the.
[00:02:41] Benjamin de la Peña: It's the challenge or the optimism, depending.
[00:02:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: Challenge and the celebration of the summiting the mountain. Okay, good. Very good. And great emojis, despite the generation. So I know you use emojis too.
[00:02:56] Benjamin de la Peña: So not as much as the next generation.
[00:02:59] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes, yes, absolutely. I'd love to start us off with getting to know you as a person a bit more.
What is your background? You sound like you have a rich background in a lot of different ways. So what led you into where you're at today?
[00:03:16] Benjamin de la Peña: Oh, man, that's a long story. We only have an hour.
[00:03:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Right?
[00:03:19] Benjamin de la Peña: Well, first off, I grew up in Manila, Metro Manila, which is a mega city.
Back when I was there, when I was growing up, 11 million. Now I think it's closer to 22. So I like big cities.
I've worked as a high school English teacher.
I've worked in communications. My undergrad is actually journalism. I worked in corporate hr. I worked in a public utility water provider in the city of Metro Manila, or the megacity of Metro Manila, where I basically fell in love with cities and figuring out what makes cities work, I ran a national youth leadership training program. So I'm very much about helping young leaders figure out how they want to make impact in the world. And then at some point, because I was so in love with cities, as a mentor once said, you know, fall in love with the question, not the solutions. I decided I take an urban planning degree. And so I went off, applied to schools, got into the school I wanted to get into, and then started learning urban planning, also with the technology layer. So coming into it, I had a deep background in databases, and that's what I threw. This was very early on. This was like two decades ago.
And then from there I went on to work on land use and transportation, transportation issues globally and locally. And then also looking at innovation that eventually led me to a stint at the Seattle Department of Transportation after a decade. Close to a decade in philanthropy working at urban issues, got into working for government, and now I run the Shared Use Mobility center, which is based in Chicago and la.
[00:05:08] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really, really interesting and diverse background. So thanks so much for sharing that journey with us. Can you tell us now more about your current work at the Shared Use Mobility Center? What does that look like? What is your goal for the organization?
[00:05:21] Benjamin de la Peña: Yeah, the Shared Use Mobility center was founded in 2014, so we are now 10 years old.
Back then, shared modes were just starting to emerge in the U.S. so you had Zipcar and car sharing. There were three cities that had bike share, including D.C. and New York.
And then there were these new companies. One of them was called Zimride, the other was called Uber. Zimride eventually became Lyft.
And over the last 10 years, all of these shared modes exploded. And now they are in nearly every major city you will find. And so our job is to both.
When we started out, we were a clearing house for what kind of policies and business models are coming out there. We've since moved into providing technical assistance to communities and city agencies and state agencies who are trying to figure out how do you add shared mobility to your city, how do you encourage people to use them?
We are committed to addressing climate, advancing equity, and really strengthening communities through shared mobility. And that includes public transportation. So that's what we do.
Most of our work is in the US with the state of California and the Federal Transit Administration. We also have a project called the Global Network for Popular Transportation. And I can tell you more about what popular transportation is. And that's kind of our global play. Looking at what's happening in the original shared mobility, which is popular transportation.
[00:06:54] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, please elaborate a little bit more. What is popular transportation?
[00:06:58] Benjamin de la Peña: Popular transportation is also called informal transportation.
I think the French like using artisanal public transit.
The Indians like calling it intermediate public transportation.
The Europeans like calling it paratransit, which confuses the North Americans because the North Americans use paratransit to mean transportation services for the differently abled. But what it is is basically homegrown indigenous systems that serve public purposes and they're privately provided. So if you've been to Bangkok or Thailand, there will be the auto, the tuk tuks.
[00:07:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: Right.
[00:07:43] Benjamin de la Peña: So if you've been to India, it'll be the auto. Rickshaws and tuk tuks are all over the Middle east too. If you've been to Nairobi, it will be the Matatus, and these are buses and four wheelers. If you've been to the Philippines, it's the Jeepneys. If you've been to Indonesia, it's the Angkots or the microtrans in Malaysia. In South Africa, they are the minibus taxis. In Western Africa, they're called danfoss. So there are various names. In Latin America, they're colectivos or peceros. I like how Jamaica calls them robots, which is shared taxis. So these are shared services that are indigenous, that by our estimation, and this is the thing, there's no global number. They carry probably about 68 to 70% of all travel and mobility across the world, but they're always looked down as oh, this is old, it's anti modern and most cities just want to get rid of them and they never can. They try. Even in cities like big cities like Mexico City, which has mature public, formal or public transportation. Like they have a subway, they have light rail, they have excellent BRT, you still have about 70% of travelists to and so the goal of the global network for popular transportation is to draw attention to these systems, understand how they work and then center them in public policy and investment. Because they move billions of people and employ millions of people around the world and yet they're absent in policy. Dr. Jackie Klopp, who started using the term popular transportation, which we feel actually represents it more likes to say they're omnipresent on the street in the global south, but totally absent in policy.
[00:09:40] Tamlyn Shimizu: That's so true. I've had probably 50 plus people on the podcast who have talked somewhat about mobility, but I don't think anyone has ever touched on this aspect of mobility. So it's obviously a very ignored part of our mobility systems.
So really interesting work that you're doing there. Can you speak of any specific project or initiative that you're particularly excited about right now?
[00:10:06] Benjamin de la Peña: We're very excited that after four years of pushing this issue, the global transportation community and the climate community is starting to talk about it. So I have colleagues who are in COP right now in Baku and they're saying that the high level climate champion on Transportation Day talked about popular transportation. Ana Claudia Rosbach, who is the head of UN Habitat talked about popular transportation and so did Jamie Leather in the Minister's conference in Baku. So it's starting to be talked about and centered in the climate discussions and the discussions on decarbonizing transportation. And this is really important because we won't achieve a just transition just by electrification. And popular transportation is shared mobility, right? It's privately provided and then people share in the use of it and technology has come on to layer on it in so many ways.
And if we really need, if, if we really need to, if we really want to decarbonize our transportation systems through a just transition, we are going to have to engage these systems.
[00:11:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting. I know in my travels I've, you know, in Asia, et cetera, I've used these transport systems so much they're usually the most convenient to use also. So really important topic, I think.
I'm interested to know your thoughts around shared mobility. But outside of urban areas with high population densities, how can shared mobility systems be adapted? Also for maybe Peri. Urban or rural context, in your experience.
[00:11:55] Benjamin de la Peña: They are so important primarily because of car ownership is hard in rural areas. Right. Because can you afford to buy a car or more than one car? So in the US about 30 million households actually don't own cars. A lot of them live in the rural areas. And so if there is no public transportation or it's very, very infrequent, how do you get to the doctor, how do you get to. Especially if it's not an emergency. Right. So the uses for non emergency transportation is very, very clear. This is in the global north and in the rural areas in the, the global south, you will find popular transportation too. Most of them are improvised. There's one particular mode of popular transportation. I don't know if you can really call it a mode. In the rural areas of the Philippines and they call it Skylab. The local name is Hubal Hubble, but they call it Skylab and it's called Skylab. Those of you who may be too young, Skylab was a satellite that fell to the earth and it had wings on it. So what they would do is they take a motorcycle and then put two planks of wood across it so that you could carry eight people. Right. So usually kids. So the rural areas improvise because they need the mobility.
And so shared mobility is even more critical in these areas, despite the fact that there's sparse populations. Now the question then is, does it make good business sense? And that may be the challenge. Right.
But if you're just going to do does it make money, Then it's going to fail. But if you think of it in terms of service and utility, then we need to support it. And supporting it also means providing the infrastructure. Infrastructure for it.
[00:13:53] Tamlyn Shimizu: So you think government should be subsidizing this type of transportation in these rural areas, basically because there's no business case maybe for it for a private to provide it. Right.
[00:14:03] Benjamin de la Peña: Let's be clear. There is no, and I'm going to say all transportation, but there is no transportation that survives, survives without public support. Yeah, the roads are built on public taxes. And you know, your gas tax or your car tax is not enough to fulfill this. And so there is support. It's a question of what level of.
[00:14:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Support, how it's allocated.
[00:14:28] Benjamin de la Peña: Exactly. Definitely. In terms of infrastructure, in the way we provide safe bike lanes. That should be done on rural roads too. In terms of providing incentives for getting higher volume vehicles like three wheelers instead of two wheelers, then that should be given support.
[00:14:48] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting with these going to the Popular transport. I'm really interested.
How. I mean, it obviously has really big cultural and social roots.
[00:15:02] Benjamin de la Peña: It does.
[00:15:02] Tamlyn Shimizu: Right.
So how do you see these dynamics influence shared mobility? The different cultural and social aspects?
[00:15:12] Benjamin de la Peña: Well, let's take that in two parts.
[00:15:13] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay.
[00:15:14] Benjamin de la Peña: Influence, shared mobility. First of all, it is shared mobility.
[00:15:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:15:18] Benjamin de la Peña: Except that when we conceptualize shared mobility outside of public transportation in the global north, we tend to think the platforms.
[00:15:24] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:25] Benjamin de la Peña: Not even formal it's platforms. Right. You have an app and whatever else. All of these app based services layered on to what were existing services. So you get to Indonesia and a company like gojek scales very rapidly. Their focus is allowing you to book an ojek, which is a motorcycle taxi, over an app. Before they got to the app, it was actually call centers and pagers. Right. And so they layered onto this and have grown to become decacorns because now you provide everything and pay everything through these apps.
So. I'm sorry, I'm backing up. I kind of forgot your question.
[00:16:09] Tamlyn Shimizu: No, it's just really based on the cultural aspects of this.
[00:16:12] Benjamin de la Peña: Yes, yes. One of the things that is so interesting. So transportation as we think about it in the global north is very westernized, right. And modern, modernized. Not in the terms of being advanced, but. But it's modern structures. Right. So here's a side story. When GTFs, which we use a lot now, was first produced by Trimet and Google in the Portland area and it started getting adapted and technologists were looking at how do you adapt it to popular transportation. The big challenge was GTFS was designed for an agency who controlled all the transportation, controlled the schedules, knew where the bus stops were. It wasn't going to work for Tuk Tuks and Auto Rachel and all of that.
So they had to extend GTFS to adapt it to this kind of multi agent thing. What's interesting about the technology platforms is they serve that kind of multi agent, independent agent routing. Right. That's what Uber does and Kareem and all the others. Right.
And they're in fact, they're contractors as far as they're concerned. So it fits, right? It fits, the technology fits. But you then have to figure out how do you work with them. So there's a cultural aspect to it, as she said. So there's a technology layer, there's a cultural aspect. And the cultural aspect of transportation, especially as it is expressed in these vehicles, is completely ignored by western transportation planners. We don't value it. But you've traveled around, right? And you see how the tuk tuks are Lavishly decorated. Right. In Pakistan, the buses have what they call Pakistani truck art. And it's just, it's beautiful.
[00:18:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: It's beautiful.
[00:18:08] Benjamin de la Peña: And jeepneys and then there's like competitions for the most best looking matatu. Right. So these are all expressions from the providers and the operators signaling that these are not just vehicles to them, they're livelihoods. And part of inclusion is to honor that and understand where it's coming from. Right. There have been studies on the mottos that danfo drivers put on their buses and it's really about their motto in life kind of thing. So we need to bring those in.
One of the things I'm sure you have experienced, or anyone who has experienced using popular transportation is it's very personal, right. You know, the driver or you're familiar with the driver.
And that expresses kind of a relational aspect which tends to disappear in a kind of mechanized, capitalistic view of how we're supposed to run public transportation or shared transportation.
[00:19:04] Tamlyn Shimizu: Just thinking off the top of my head with this discussion, I'm thinking about what's the goal in including these modes of transport, the popular transports within the conversations and policies. If you say that they're running already. Yeah, right, they're running already. They're, they function well. They're sometimes the most convenient forms of transport. What is the goal in talking about them and supporting them more if they're already functioning? Just to play devil's advocate.
[00:19:35] Benjamin de la Peña: Well, they are functioning despite that's usually the case. Right. So the narrative in nearly every city is we're going to get rid of these when we mature as a sick.
So the chief minister of Delhi two decades ago, after they built their new metro lines, of which there were five and they were excellent metro lines, they built them within time and under budget. She said, well, now we can get rid of the auto rickshaws. Well, 50% of your population cannot afford the cost of the metro ticket.
80% of your population rides auto rickshaws. And of course your train, your metro can only go to certain places. So these are creatures in the ecosystem of transportation that serve different purposes. The policy goal is to first accept them as assets because very often we approach them as problematized. Right. It's a problematized approach. And it's like, how are you going to solve them? If you start appreciating them as assets first, then figure out how to make it better.
This is not to romanticize these systems as they have no problems. They do. They have old vehicles, they're using bad fuels, there is crime in many places. And then dependability is sometimes an issue. But that's a problem of a lot of transportation systems too. Right. Like my favorite example is they will say there's sexual harassment in popular transportation. And yes, there's sexual harassment across society in public transportation too. That's why you have female only train cars in India and in Japan. Right. And so it's. You cannot put on popular transportation what is a societal problem. Just not to minimize it. But so the first thing is to appreciate them as assets and second, understand that they are small and medium enterprises first, rather than trying to discipline them into the behavior you want, figure out what is in the business model and what are the business incentives so that they earn better so that they can replace their vehicles and they will behave better as transportation services.
[00:21:54] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really, really interesting to learn from you about this.
What's the split between the global north and the global South? Mostly we're talking about global south here. Right. That's using the popular transportation mostly.
[00:22:08] Benjamin de la Peña: But popular transportation exists in the global north too. So people who live in New York City will know about the dollar vans. The dollar vans are essentially like matatus or jeepneys, but they're vans.
And it used to be you pay the dollar, I think now it's 250 tracks. The subway cost. They emerge and serve the areas that were not served by the subway or the buses. And invariably these were areas that were immigrant, rich or communities of color. And so they're there. And even Hong Kong has the.
Which are. They look like public transportation and they are franchised by public transportation. But they are privately provided and they serve the areas the smaller buses. They serve the areas where the big buses can't go.
[00:22:55] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really, really interesting actually. I love this conversation so far.
How do we make sure.
So these transit. Popular transport is often outside of regulatory frameworks. Right. So how do we balance that with. While preserving affordability and accessibility?
[00:23:22] Benjamin de la Peña: They're not actually outside. So that's the problem with why calling them informal is problematic. First of all, it valorizes formal. But if I ask people to define what is formal transportation? You can't really define it. I think institutional transportation is a better word.
But they're regulated in.
Misregulated is actually the word in some countries. The regulation is the amount of fares in some countries, what routes you can serve. Right.
But in nearly all places there's kind of this antagonistic approach to it. Like we'll tolerate them, but we'll get rid of them when everyone else owns a car or we get the big Expensive bus rapid transit.
So the approach again is changing the point of view to first appreciating them as assets and understanding how they work and then trying to see how do you improve these services rather than kind of this, call it what it is called colonialistic. We're bringing the thing that will improve your life and we're going to build it, we're going to throw a ton of money on it and it disconnects everything else and then people still use because they depend on it, popular transportation. But now you've made them less profitable. Right. And so then the services then degrade.
But there are success stories.
[00:24:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, good point. Can you share a success story?
[00:24:52] Benjamin de la Peña: One of my favorites is Jakarta. So Jakarta has really moved towards encouraging more public transportation. They have big investments in rail and bus rapid transit. They have the most miles or kilometers of bus rapid transit service.
They also integrated in what are called, these are small vans carrying about 8 to 12 people. Again independently provided and integrating them through a payment system. So you have a Trans Jakarta card, I forget the name of the card itself, but they integrated them into the payment system and they moved the Angkots who signed up from getting fares in cash to being able to pay with a card. And the Angkot operators were paid by Trans Jakarta for miles served or kilometers served rather than the number of people. So now the system works really, really well as kind of last mile or if there's no major buses or it's off hours. The Angkor student work. So it can be done.
But again, it depends on the situation locally and what the existing systems are. Mexico City is also actively rethinking how it engages and investing in the colectivos. And so is Bogota.
[00:26:15] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting case studies. So with technology you mentioned, you know, when we think about shared mobility, especially in the global north, we think about, you know, platforms and these things. But I'm wondering how you see technology like platforms, digital payments, etc. Within the scope of popular transport.
[00:26:37] Benjamin de la Peña: Oh, they are among the first to adapt. Really?
[00:26:40] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:26:40] Benjamin de la Peña: And it's really interesting because more than a decade ago the auto rickshaws in India started call centers. Right. And so there are businesses that were using call centers so that you can then hail an auto rickshaw. And then they've since moved up. Like I said, Gojek, which is now their go to because merged with Tokopedia, has half a million Ojac drivers on the platform. Right. And it's a great way to hail.
We could go deeper into how they had to adapt in so many ways. But the popular transportation operators are also adapting in their own ways. So what's happened for instance in India was the operators started using WhatsApp instead because then you could hail and then pay over the app.
Or there is a new group that came out, the Bangalore Auto Rickshaw Drivers association actually developed their own app called Namayatri that has now is being adapted in many places like Delhi. And it's the operators themselves, the drivers themselves who run this app. Right. So it is again in Nairobi.
You could pay through M Pesa, certain drivers. And there have been failures in technology, but there is actually a very good way to integrate them. The biggest challenge is popular transportation tends to operate on a cash basis because you have to pay your tout your collar with cash. Also, if a policeman stops you and asks for a bribe, you cannot pay them electronically. Although I hear it's starting to happen in certain parts of Latin America. And so there's a need for cash. And so as that changes as people move out of cash, the non cash payment systems will then take root. And it's already being used in many parts of Asia.
[00:28:37] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, I've definitely used it in India. I've definitely used an app to get a rickshaw before. So yeah, definitely. Really interesting to think about. I'm wondering how you see more broadly, what do you see as the biggest challenge in advancing equitable mobility in the north, the south, in the whole world?
[00:28:57] Benjamin de la Peña: I think we need to get off our dependency on cars, right. What cars have done is they increased convenience. Right. Because it's just you take the vehicle, you own the vehicle, you go from place to place. But it is a waste of resources, both in terms of space and the infrastructure we build for it. And also fossil fuels as we're burning it, even as electrical. Right. So Most private cars 90% of the time are parked. And but what we need, and it used to be that it was just the option, was either take your car or you take the bus and train. But if the bus and train are inconvenient, they don't go to where you go, then it's easier to get a car or maybe a motorcycle ride your own.
We need to increase the amount of transportation options available to people so that you could take a shared E bike if you wanted to, or a scooter or an on demand micro transit or a tuk tuk or an auto rickshaw or a shared van and have all of those options available which are way more efficient in moving people and a per capita basis. Right. Because 60 people in a bus or 12 people, or 24 people in a van is way more energy efficient.
And what we need to do is adapt these so that people have more choices. Because of course you can take the motorcycle to go to Ikea if you're trying to buy something big. It'd be great if you could do a short term rental on a pickup if it's really big, or a car, and that's where shared car services go. Or if you are drunk late at night, then you know you want to go home, then getting hailing an Uber is really, really good, rather than driving. So we need to develop more of those systems. And I think technology promises to kind of make it easier for all of us. We're still pursuing it, but that could be it. And I think the future is that you have multiple options. And the cost of a car, owning a car is really, really high. So in the US it's about $12,000 to own a car and operate a car for a year. Right. And that's regardless of whether that's just operating. Yes. In Germany, the research they did was over 50 years. It'll cost a household about €800,000 to own a car. So it's, you know, second highest expense.
And that's just not sustainable. We're not saying people shouldn't buy cars. Go ahead and buy cars. Copenhagen is an interesting example. Car ownership is high in Copenhagen, but people use their bikes more for convenience. You use your car to go out for the trips to the countryside or whatever, but on a daily basis you use your bike because it's way more convenient. So we need to do that. Right. Just so that we get to a more sustainable and equitable system. So you, you know, the cost of entry isn't that I have to be able to afford a car.
[00:31:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: What do you think is slowing us down to getting to that multimodal kind of dream that you laid out where you can take all of these different. You have all these different options. You can choose the most convenient point. What is slowing us down from getting to that point?
[00:32:01] Benjamin de la Peña: A lot of it is institutional arrangements. Right. And trying to figure it out. And also biases in how we understand transportation. Right. Like you said, in the places you've been to in India and in Thailand, they're really, really convenient. And yet the way we build and prioritize what's on the road is very hostile to them. Right. Because we build our roads for cars, not even for buses. And we've learned with BRT that bus lanes are really, really good. But then we don't do the three wheelers. Right. And so. And it's the same thing with active transportation. Bikes in bike lanes, protected bike lanes particularly, get more people to use them. And so the institutional infrastructure setup right now is heavily biased towards private car use. And we need to get off of that and then have more. A more balanced ecosystem of choices.
[00:32:55] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, very good point. Now I'd like to give an open floor to you in case we didn't get the chance maybe to talk about a topic that you really think would be important for listeners to know about. Do you have such a topic?
[00:33:08] Benjamin de la Peña: Oh man, I've been preaching already on this whole thing and that's that I'm boring because this is mostly what I talk about.
[00:33:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: It's not boring at all. Trust me.
[00:33:17] Benjamin de la Peña: I think. And this is what I am presenting on later.
The problem sometimes with technology, particularly mobility, is we're focused at the wrong level.
So because ride hail has worked really, really well, we tend to want to apply the ride hail individual trip model to everything we try to do.
And so mas mobility as a service, which has been talked about for years, but it's very, very hard to work out is a struggle because coordinating multiple choices at the level of the individual journey is really, really hard.
Transit agencies don't do that. They're concerned about their users. But what they do is they balance demand. We know how many people tend to ride at this time and from these areas and we have to make sure that the supply meets that. And I think we need to start moving towards there of thinking differently about what the information system for transportation needs to do. The focus on the individual journey also makes it harder to address equity and climate issues. But the focus on geographies and populations and demand and supply allows us to think about the equity issues. Right. And greenhouse gas emission issues. So we need to recalibrate how we think about technology, move a little bit away from kind of toxic individualism and kind of drive it towards what will be good for the community.
[00:34:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting point. So thanks so much for sharing. With that, we come to the end of our main interview part. I have a little segment for you and we have fun segments after the main interview part. And the one I've chosen for you today is called Trial and Error. It's talking about what went wrong, what mistakes were made along the way, and more importantly, what lessons were learned. Maybe you can think of an example that was, I don't want to say failure because of course it was a learning, let's say.
[00:35:19] Benjamin de la Peña: Yeah. And it has to be transportation I mean, we're not talking about anything that you would like. High school dating experiences.
[00:35:27] Tamlyn Shimizu: Well, that might be a little out of scope.
[00:35:30] Benjamin de la Peña: Cashless fare payments. Right. And one of my favorite stories is Nairobi. Google is there. M Pesa was being used and they decided that, oh, we're going to try cashless fare collection. They came up with what they called the Bebo card. This was a decade ago. And you would, it was a stored value card. You would fill it up with value and then you would pay the Matatu in theory and they would provide the tap in models.
Problem was not all the Matatu drivers wanted it. So when you put in your cash onto this Bebo card, you had to wait for the Matatu that had the Bebo sticker on it so that you could tap it in.
And so that made it very inconvenient. The other problem it had was you couldn't use that value anywhere else. So if you're, you know, lower income or middle income, stored value cards basically locks in your money. Yeah, right. And then also for the drivers and operators, it was like that earlier samples like I need cash.
So it was early, but I think the lesson there. So it failed. And there have been many other cases like that where it's cashless.
The lesson is don't lock resources in. Make paying easy, but don't lock resources in. Right. And that's why the ride hail apps of Southeast Asia have grown into super apps where you pay for your massage and your beauty parlor and your rent and your insurance and everything else. Right. And stores, convenience stores and the mobility apps in Africa are trying to head that way too, of becoming super apps. And certainly Latin America has that. So the thing to do is you have to understand the ecosystem for the user and what they pay with and not be focused on just one aspect, which was how do you make cashless fare collection work for Disney?
[00:37:35] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good case. I hate those reloadable apps because I always forget I have cards or whatever. I always forget I have money there. Right.
[00:37:44] Benjamin de la Peña: I heard somewhere that Starbucks in the US is actually the second biggest bank if you count their stored value cards, gift cards. They have like a billion dollars of unused value in gift cards, which is great for them because they can float it. Right, Right. So there's a lot of that. And you know, the transit agencies are learning that too.
And open loop payments are making it easier to pay with your phone or pay with your credit card for the unbanked. The apps are really, really good too. So I think there's a lot of growing.
[00:38:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: It's transitioning in that way. Yeah, absolutely. Now, we're coming to the last question. It's a question that I ask every single guest and it's really interesting to hear all the different perspectives that I get. And the question is to you. What is a smart city?
[00:38:32] Benjamin de la Peña: A smart city is a city where that works for people.
It's not even technology, and it's where people can throw thrive.
And the last thing you want is where technology does everything for you and you have no challenge in life. So a smart city is a city where people become smart and they're engaged and they are not just consumers.
Smart city is where we help them become active citizens and participants.
[00:39:07] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good and very nice answer as well. So with that, I have to give you a big thank you for coming onto the podcast. It was really a pleasure getting to talk to you.
[00:39:14] Benjamin de la Peña: Thank you so much. Tamlin, this is fine.
[00:39:16] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, it really was. And I also learned so much during this episode. So thanks for sharing your knowledge and thanks to all of our listeners. Of course, it wouldn't happen without you as well. So don't forget, you can always create a free account on BABLE Smart Cities eu. You can find out more about smart city projects, solutions, implementations and more. Thank you very much.
