Why Transportation Fails offers an in-depth critique of transportation failures in South Africa and beyond. Minibus taxis are unreliable and overcrowded; buses and trains are old and poorly maintained; and new services are derailed by spiraling capital and operational costs, protracted and politicized rollouts, and unsolvable infrastructural challenges. Rather than focusing on these failures, the conceptual and practical analyses in this book develop a critical understanding of transportation and highlight the opportunities for transportation to be more inclusive, innovative, and sustainable.

This book applies cutting-edge scholarship from geography and urban studies – decolonial geographies, Black geographies, policy mobilities, walking geographies, animal geographies, art geographies, and health geographies – to reframe transportation failure. The interdisciplinarity of this scholarship builds an approach that not only tells the story of transportation in South Africa, but also uncovers a range of conceptual interpretations and imaginations that stretch beyond urban mobilities and urban development. In decentering traditional geographies of knowledge production, Why Transportation Fails contributes to critical considerations of urban transportation in Africa and aspects of transportation justice within social and spatial transformation.

Given the never-ending financial and political investment in solving transportation, Why Transportation Fails is essential reading for scholars of architecture, development, geography, politics, sociology as well as urban planners and practitioners.