Behind us is the time when citizens were forced to wait so many hours at a stop, waiting for a bus that no one knew if it would arrive. Although this situation still prevails today, things are changing with the digitalization of the semi-collective passenger transport system, which has given users in the cities of Maputo and Matola reason to smile.
The Txapita app, a transportation tracking system, has enabled passengers to get a sense of the time it will take until the bus arrives at their stop, as well as to monitor its route. A year and a half after launching the platform on the market, the project leaders appear satisfied with the level of adherence.
“The platform has come to address exactly the mobility and transport problems that the city faces,” say Eddie Massinga and Rene Meneses, who developed the app. And they continue: “We allow fleets to display greater intelligence and rationalization of resources. But also, the passengers can now locate the bus wherever they are and be sure that the bus they need is in operation.”
The numbers seem to corroborate this, although the pandemic caused a contraction. “We have had 18,000 users since the launch,” the managers reveal. “We had some losses due to the pandemic and for other still unknown reasons. And we currently have 12,000 active users,” they add. Although the app is receiving positive feedback from the market, the managers indicate that in the beginning, uptake was not an easy task, as several systems were cyclically being damaged in the buses. “Collectors and drivers were not satisfied with this tracking system that the app has and they saw it as if it was kind of an inspection of their activity, that could harm them with their bosses. But after that, the process matured and we managed to overcome it.”
The platform is currently installed on 386 semi-collective passenger buses that travel in the cities of Maputo and Matola. Although some studies point out that internet access at the national level is inefficient and expensive, Txapita’s managers say that this is not a barrier for customers, as the platform can be used on any device with minimal resources.
“We work to make the app use as little data as possible. Typically, the app is used on a low network scale, with a delay ratio of three to five seconds. And we believe that it isn’t very serious considering the mobility of the city itself,” they justify.
Text: Hermenegildo Langa
Photo: Ricardo Franco
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