Abstract
Most Russian cities are currently facing major transformation processes in the public transport supply. Commercial paratransit services, known as marshrutkas, have been criticised heavily for unsafe and uncomfortable facilities as well as for anti-social business behaviour, prone to tax evasion and daily penny wars on the street. Consequently, many municipalities have enforced various strategies to restrict informal marshrutka services. This article compares the distinct policy strategies of two municipalities, Rostov on Don and Volgograd, and discusses the different outcomes. When analysing the case studies, two prevailing discourses seem to have informed the locally applied transport policies: a neoliberal, free market approach that perceives the loosely regulated commercial transport operations superior to state-led services and a rather neo-modernist perception of informal transport operation, calling for a rigorous push back of marshrutka mobility. Prominent in both policy discourses is the notion of informality as an instrument to govern the transport setting.Reviewing the developing field of informal transport studies, the article argues that the governments of the respective cities have employed (simplified) notions of informality as a legitimisation argument to take action. A closer perspective on the daily operations, however, unveils a socially institutionalised transport service full of complex operation practices beyond policy-strategic divides between the formal and informal. The contribution utilises the formal/informal nexus successfully developed in urban studies and applies it to international transport studies. Thus it enables the unveiling of insufficiencies in urban transport provision without falling in the trap of superficial modernisation narratives.
Highlights
In August 2016, the city government of Moscow implemented an extensive public transport reform, merging all commercial marshrutka minibus1 providers under one private operator, offering integrated public transport services synchronised with the municipal transport services
Paratransit services are perceived as possible ‘smart’ on-demand solutions for the overstrained traffic infrastructure in developed cities of the Global North (Atasoy et al 2016; Jokinen et al 2011). They are described as a threat of cities in the Global South, where paratransit services are cannibalising municipal transport offers and hindering modernisation and progress, while generating a competition advantage out of weak regulation schemes and illegal operator structures (Shimazaki und Rahman 1995; Finn und Mulley 2011; Ferro 2015)
Large scale marshrutka abolishment attempts are justified as the only proper solution to current transport challenges, replicating the old modernisation narrative in informal literature that informality will vanish once transition is received (Williams und Round 2008; Hart 1973; Moser 1977) Instead of overcoming alleged backwardness, this leads to spatially divided inequality, where certain neighbourhoods are literally cut off from the transport network as most municipalities do not possess the financial capital or the political will to replace the entire marshrutka network by municipal transport providers
Summary
In August 2016, the city government of Moscow implemented an extensive public transport reform, merging all commercial marshrutka minibus providers under one private operator, offering integrated public transport services synchronised with the municipal transport services. Urban assemblages are contained in very unique scales of space, place, history and structure composition but they invite the drawing of common trajectories (e.g. marshrutka mobility) that may bring two distinct settings in a productive encounter of commonalities and difference in relation to an urgent public issue (Roy 2003) This is important as urban comparison schemes are an empirical fact of our everyday life. Particularities or specific cities arise through interrelations between objects, events, places and identities; and it is through clarifying how these relations are produced and changed in practice that close study of a particular part can illuminate the whole” (Hart 2002, p.14) In this sense, the marshrutka as socio-technical materiality and a locally embedded institution certainly constitutes a mode of urban life in Rostov on Don and Volgograd. It tries to tackle informality not as an explanatory tool but rather as the initial object of investigation to research urban modernisation processes on a broader scale without losing sensitivity for local peculiarities
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