Category: Updates

Year-In-Review 2015

As 2015 starts making its exit, and the various ‘Year in Review’ posts begin to proliferate, we are excited about what’s in the Bus Map Project pipeline in the coming months. We are buzzing with ideas and have several threads to follow up on after the holiday season, so this is a great time to reflect on the project so far.

Our modest proposal emerged during one hot summer of great anger and great hope in Lebanon. We have been insisting on doing things a little differently from what we’re used to, and it has been very encouraging to see positive and enthusiastic responses from the people we’ve met and interacted with along the way. It appears that the need for new approaches to incremental urban change is something that others can easily recognize—so, thank you! Thank you for coming along for the ride.

Since our ‘soft launch,’ we have enjoyed letting the project morph and adapt according to the connections we’ve made. In the coming weeks, we will be drawing on what we’ve learned to develop an action plan for 2016: to widen the circle of participation in the mapping process, and develop specific areas of focus based on the partnerships we’ve formed. We invite you to get in touch with us if you have any thoughts or concerns, want to work directly with us, or simply feel like a chat.

And of course, we will be updating you about our recent activities: what’s up with that bus route in Ghosta? What was the most popular route mapped by participating student-designers? How can you join our emerging ‘citizen design’ team? Answers to these questions and more will be coming soon.

For now, we wish you happy holidays!

Bus Map Project at #CitizenDesigner

This week, we took part in #CitizenDesigner, a three-day event hosted by Graphicism at the Lebanese University in Hadath. Here’s a quick summary of what we presented:

It’s important to emphasize that we’re not proposing anything radically new. We draw inspiration from nearby experiences like the Nairobi Digital Matatus initiative, and the World Bank’s mapping project in Egypt. We can learn from these examples, and adapt them to our own context.

While the idea and technology might not be new, our approach to public transport advocacy in Beirut is a little bit different. Bus Map Project aims to be collaborative, open source, gradual and modular. All these buzzwords simply mean that we are a platform for your input and concerns. They also mean that we believe in treating the existing bus system the same way. Ya3ne, for us, “Citizen Design” means taking existing systems seriously.

Bus Map Project at Green Line’s Transport Conference

bmp-greenline-sept2015

Thank you Green Line for inviting us to discuss our tiny project at yesterday’s “Local Governance of the Transport Sector: Roles & Responsibilities” event. It was great having such a wide range of actors and stakeholders in the same room, and we hope to see this pluralism strengthened and expanded in the future.

As was clear from the rich debates we heard throughout the day, different perspectives will not always see eye to eye. What we think about transportation is determined by what we believe about government, economy, society, etc. We all know that. But even if we agree on the broad slogans, the difficult questions of strategy, method and approach will remain.

As Bus Map Project, we spoke from the perspective of bus riders. While we do not claim to represent anyone other than ourselves, our thinking — as summarized in this slide — is founded on a simple belief: public transport can improve when the riding public begins to speak as riders. This can happen in so many ways: when ridership expands, or when the sector enters the public eye like electricity or waste management has done, or through the relationships we form in the process of collective mapping, etc. But at its most basic level, this begins in the simple act of insisting that *we exist* . . .

That is the core message of our project. The map is a tool we put to use.

Why “Bus Map Project”?

This project’s name is inspired by the “snowball” approach of Rotaract’s “Bus Stops Project“, which you can read more about in this article written by our co-founder, Jad:

“According to project coordinator Jean-Marc Adaimi, the Rotaract Bus Stop Project was intended to “serve the community” by addressing an actual need, and “not just setting a goal and talking about it.” This meant servicing the country’s bus network as it is, even if it does not always “follow certain criteria,” as he put it, revealing a mix of pragmatism and far-sightedness to the project that’s not always seen in discussions of public transport in Lebanon.”