What Did We Learn? | TheCityFix

Transforming Transportation 2025 is in the books. After a year of geopolitical turmoil and escalating climate impacts, the transport sector is seeing rapid change on multiple fronts. Across two days of events, leaders in government, business, academia and civil society explored how the electric vehicle (EV) transition is being affected by the war in Ukraine, how green industrialization is being spurred in new places and much more.

“We have a challenging policy environment in quite a few countries…and I don’t think we can ignore it,” said WRI President & CEO Ani Dasgupta. “But I also think we can’t get totally distracted by it.”

He noted that there are many success stories to lift up and replicate, showing how transport can be done differently, and that packed attendance showed “we’re going to keep doing this until we get to the destination.”

“We’ve not only built this conference, but we’ve built a community,” he said. “This is why we’re here, so that our community can not only do innovation in different places, but we can add it up so we can make change globally.”

World Bank Senior Managing Director Axel van Trotsenburg noted that efforts in the transport sector affect entire economies and people’s access to critical services and opportunities. For example, more than 2 billion people lack access to reliable public transport.

More Demand Than Supply

Across Transforming Transportation’s two main forum days (March 11-12, 2025), held virtually and in-person at World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C., nearly 3,000 participants, including 16 ministers, noted again and again how rapidly the sector is changing.

For 30 years, how you interacted with public transport in most African cities hardly changed, said Jit Bhattacharya, CEO & Co-Founder of BasiGo, a Nairobi-based electric bus (e-bus) company. “Now, we’re in a time of radical transformation.”

Speakers noted that disruptions to energy markets, driven in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have made diesel fuel subsidies harder for many governments to maintain. In places like Indonesia, Ethiopia and Kenya, this is making e-buses, in particular, a more attractive option than ever before. “Now, they’re competing on a level playing field,” said Bhattacharya, and demand is so high, companies are not able to keep up supply. “It’s going to take us three years to get through backorders right now.”

Josh Wahl, CEO of Ampersand, an electric motorcycle company headquartered in Kigali, said they have 7,000 customers on their waiting list.

“Our challenge is to convince people to use (EVs), and then once they use it, they will see they save money,” said Rachmat Kaimuddin, Deputy of the Coordinating Ministry for Basic Infrastructure for Indonesia.

Kaimuddin said that after the Jakarta city government began considering total cost of ownership for e-buses, including fuel savings, all new bus purchases were e-buses by the end of 2024. In a city facing significant air pollution, he said that “if you don’t believe in the benefits of e-buses, just ride behind one on a motorbike!”

Further, because of interest in spurring domestic industry and because secondhand EVs are not as effective as secondhand internal combustion engine vehicles, many countries are implementing policies that encourage local manufacturing. The need for new charging infrastructure also drives job growth. Charging infrastructure and public transportation offer more jobs per dollar invested than road infrastructure, said Rogier van den Berg, Global Director of WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.

Between fuel subsidies and industrialization goals, not to mention climate and air quality benefits, EVs are being pushed along by multiple policy objectives.

The shift is further accelerated by passenger preference. Juan Carlos Muñoz, Minister of Transport and Telecommunications for Chile, noted that in their experience rolling out e-buses in Santiago (home to the largest e-bus fleet outside of China) and other cities, people feel very proud and want to ride the EVs more than the diesel vehicles they are replacing. E-buses bring a sense of modernization to riders, he said, a feeling “that the state is investing in me.”

In Nairobi, people are getting out of diesel vehicles and going backwards in queues just to ride in an EV, said Bhattacharya, because they’re more comfortable and a better experience.

Expanding Transport Services for All

Part of the pent-up demand for better transport is tied to the continued poor experience of women on public transport in many places, said panelists.

“Finding quality buses at a price that works for our customers is still a challenge,” said Damilola Olokesusi, Co-Founder and CEO of Shuttlers, a ride-hailing app based in Lagos. Women want seats on high quality services – that are safer, more reliable, more efficient – but they aren’t finding enough matches, she said.

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, said that women have different transport needs than men – and that these differences are poorly understood and accounted for in many places.

Madariaga performed a groundbreaking study for the Spanish government that looked at mobility patterns nationally and found some 40% of trips for women aged 30-45 were for what she termed “mobility of care” purposes – activities like caregiving, medical trips, unpaid domestic labor, shopping and escorting loved ones. For men of the same age group, it was just 9%. These activities are not well accounted for by the standard categories that transport agencies use to categorize trips around the world.

“By naming those trips with this umbrella category, we can make them visible,” said Madariaga. “This way, we change our viewpoint of how we understand, in broad terms, the transportation systems, and how people use them, and the needs of people, so we can make them visible, and we can also quantify them.”

Madariaga noted that women also tend to use public transport more often than men. Other studies have found more sensitivity to the presence of robust safety infrastructure on women’s willingness to use bike lanes. A better understanding of these differences is therefore crucial to creating transport systems that work better for everyone.

Alhaji Fanday Turay, Minister of Transport and Aviation for Sierra Leone, outlined efforts to train cadres of female bus drivers to help make services more responsive to women riders. So far, female drivers have been better drivers, in terms of avoiding crashes, he said. Other panelists noted that female bus drivers tend to collect more ticket fares.

“As we shape the future of transport, let us remember that inclusivity is the foundation, not an afterthought,” said Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat.

Madhav Pai, CEO of WRI India, said that open data sharing through application programming interfaces (APIs) that community members, researchers, government and the private sector can access are one way to move beyond traditional approaches to transport planning. The newly launched SHIFT Transport Initiative in India aims to be a digital hub for 25 cities where anyone can access data from a variety of services to share insights, co-create products and monitor progress towards creating more inclusive mobility, among other objectives.

“If people build the system, they work in the system, they’ll feel part of it,” said María Fernanda Ramírez, the Safe and Sustainable Lead at Despacio, a Colombia-based research organization.

Safer, More Sustainable Streets

Transforming Transportation week kicked off on Monday, March 10, 2025, with a group bike ride from WRI’s office around downtown Washington, D.C. A group of more than 40 delegates heard about changes to the city’s infrastructure and tested the results themselves.

D.C. is one of many cities committed to Vision Zero and yet still struggles with traffic deaths and injuries.

“We know stronger laws will save lives,” said Kelly Larson, Road Safety Program Director for Bloomberg Philanthropies, during a plenary session on road safety. She said Bloomberg Philanthropies is supporting efforts to strengthen national road safety policies in 15 countries currently and, through partnerships with governments and other organizations (including WRI), has helped protect 4 billion people around the world over the last two decades through road safety advocacy.

“We need to get the basics of road safety right,” said van den Berg, which requires a wrap-up around approach: speed management, law enforcement, urban design and education. “Education without reinforcement is entertainment,” said Larson.

But limited budgets and the inertia of the status quo can cause safety to slip down the priority list. “The majority of the resources in the developing world, unfortunately, go to transportation for cars, for vehicles, for motorcycles,” said Claudia Adriazola-Steil, Director for Health and Road Safety at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. The result is a deprioritization of walking and cycling – “active mobility,” which is often how the vast majority of people get around – and much more dangerous streets.

Currently, more than 1.2 million people die in road crashes every year, a number that is trending up for a variety of reasons, including increasing urbanization and motorization. New WRI research on motorcycle safety notes that two- and three-wheelers now account for the highest share of road fatalities of any mode.

“We know the problem; we know the intensity of the situation,” said Jean Todt, the UN-Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Road Safety, who previously headed up Formula 1, which faced a safety crisis of its own. “We have the prescriptions, but how do we implement the prescriptions?”

Guly Sabahi, Senior Advisor for Climate Finance at the NDC Partnership, flagged one solution currently being explored: a “catalytic fund” that could help fund more active mobility infrastructure, potentially even tapping into climate funds. “The new round of NDCs are due,” she said. “If active mobility is identified as part of infrastructure goals in NDCs, commercial investors will be more interested and willing to fund.”

“A Huge Opportunity”

Several panelists noted how innovative financing – to help overcome higher upfront costs for EVs in order to allow more people to leverage lower costs of ownership, or crowd-in climate finance, or help municipalities with lower credit ratings – has an opportunity to unleash supply in many regions to meet the tremendous demand for better transport being seen at the moment.

“We need to unlock serious international finance for us to actually move on the electrification journey,” urged Pai. “This is a huge opportunity.”

Dakar’s new electric bus rapid transit (BRT) system, Africa’s first, received the Sustainable Transport Award from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), in part for managing to combine public and private investments. One of three Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship Awards this year also focused on understanding the lessons of successfully financed large-scale transport projects in developing countries.

“By working together, we can create systems that not only move people, but move cities, nations and regions toward a more sustainable future,” said Frannie Léautier, Partner and CEO of SouthBridge Investment, a Pan-African advisory and investment company.

Wrapping up the forum, van den Berg said the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Brazil was an opportunity to show how sustainable transport can deliver for people and the planet.

“We cannot allow inertia, individualism and irresponsibility to win the day,” said van den Berg. “We can step up as a community on the future of transport, create jobs, cleaner cities and safer streets, raise ambitions on delivering NDCs, and support Brazil in delivering a successful COP in challenging times.”

“We must continue to seek the path forward, following the successes that so many of you have contributed to, and focus on what delivers change to people.”

Schuyler Null is Senior Communications Manager at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.

Taylor Symes is Communications Specialist at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.