Based on discussions with the two Lebanese gas station network operators—Medco and IPT—it seems fair to describe the first step of the journey into this particular private-sector infrastructure construction as based on the understanding that electric vehicles will make their appearances in Lebanon sooner or later, and that the country could ill afford to fall behind global developments in electric mobility.

Notwithstanding, however, the faint hope for a sustainable electricity solution among large parts of the Lebanese population, there are clear technical possibilities to solve Lebanon’s electricity infrastructure and road quality problems. It appears paradoxical then that the nation’s electricity supply problems feature heavily in popular perceptions as a barrier against phasing in electric cars. By comparison, the much less mutable geographical size and population distribution of the country combine into an issue that is not much talked about in connection with the viability of e-mobility approaches.

Lebanon is a very small country if one thinks about distances that need to be covered—driving time is a different consideration. From practically any starting point in the country, there is simply no direction in which a person can drive for 250 km straight and still find themselves in Lebanon. Also, Lebanon, by international comparison, has high urbanization, high population density, and relatively short internal distances when compared with any non-small-island nation.

On one hand, this means that establishment of electric driving infrastructures and charging units are not nearly as challenging in Lebanon as they are in thinly populated territories or nations where long stretches of roads lie between settlements—whether one thinks of geographies in Africa and Australia or countries like Norway that face automotive e-infrastructure issues.

To illustrate the point, Lebanon’s gas station network is estimated at about 3,200 units, of which 2,500 are officially registered. In a country where the population density is assumed to be around 600 persons per km² spread across 10, 452 km². European countries with gas station networks in the similar range of 2,500 to 3,000 in total are, for example, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria. However, Sweden is 45 times the size of Lebanon by territory, Bulgaria 11 times, and Austria eight times. Population densities in these countries range from just under 30 persons per km² in Sweden, to 64 in Bulgaria, and 101 people in Austria.

Such data suggests that exceedingly few people in Lebanon would have to cover as large a distance as typical Austrians, Bulgarians, and Swedes when they want to visit relatives or business acquaintances across the country, and that the average hamlet dweller in Sweden, Bulgaria, and Austria has to drive much farther than the typical Lebanese to get to the nearest fuel pump.

The move to future mobility will economically be marked by new winners and creative destruction of old realities.

So, in relative terms, Lebanon does not look like a territory that will face particular economic cost barriers when it comes to the establishment of a charging unit network. Recalling the experience with the rollout of mobile telecom infrastructure during the country’s post-conflict restoration of communications in the 1990s reinforces the notion how fast the nationwide mobile networks could be built in regional comparison.

On the other hand, the shortness of distances and high concentration of people in Lebanon also means that economic feasibility of mobility options involving high initial acquisition and comparatively advantageous, or even low operation costs, is not easily achievable. It is, apart from a few people who drive for a living, quite a rare feat for any motorist in this country to cover more than 100 km or 200 km on a given day and reach an average annual count of more than 20,000 km or 30,000 km.

This, in turn, means that vehicles with a trade-off between elevated acquisition cost and low operations cost make little sense in Lebanon, if lifetime cost of a car is the main consideration. Electric vehicles (EVs) of certain power, quality, and comfort, cost more than similar cars with an internal combustion engine, at least in 2019 and probably for some years to come. This means that an average Lebanese with daily driving needs of 25 km to 35 km (9,000 km to 12,500 km per year) will hardly ever save enough money from e-charging (vs. filling up with gasoline) to recover the higher acquisition cost of the e-version of his compact or middle-class car.

Such factors illustrate that overall feasibility of automotive electric mobility is a complex scenario by which barriers and opportunities will differ widely from country to country. Moreover, in the current situation of undeniable mobility needs that clash with old, economically, and environmentally no longer tenable solutions, engineers, tinkerers, and visionaries are crowding the field of radical inventions with solutions that have technical potential.

Contenders that are visible from the cognitively very limited vantage points of media range from cars with integrated solar cells, where a long-range passenger sedan prototype this summer was introduced by a Dutch manufacturer, to hydrogen-powered vehicles using the fuel cell technology that is often mentioned in the discussion and is available internationally in some vehicles on the road. But in all probability there are many not-yet-discussed inventions that are looming just beyond the horizon as solutions in both the in-car and infrastructure technology realms.

As the market constitutes the economy’s cognitive laboratory for discovering the most feasible practical solutions for an economic problem with great social and financial implications, i.e. profit potentials, the move to future mobility will economically be marked by new winners and creative destruction of old realities. State interferences in this market process in form of regulations and sometimes unintended nudges will additionally influence the mobility developments and sometimes distort them, but public interventions are inevitable due to the great importance of mobility for society.

Mobility of self is much more than automobilism

The entirety of automotive mobility and diverse digital mobility is thus being immersed in an ocean of change that is concealing a wide variety of challenges but also is already witnessing all the mobility perks, trimmings, and side shows—from hybrid cruise ships to Formula E car racing—that the world has become addicted to in the 20th century.

Also, it pays to remember that this is not just about cars. Socially and financially profitable digital mobility trends relate to everything with wheels. Biking fans can look—and buy in Beirut—top of the line electric bicycles, which today means digitized two-wheelers with pedals, advanced and often very well-concealed batteries and minimalistic electric motors that support and amplify human pedal power. While pricey for a bicycle, quality specimen are engineered to transform both urban and cross-country pedaling efforts into paradisiac experiences. Moreover, sleek e-bikes of recent manufactures—and Europe is right now brimming with startup producers and avalanches of fascinating new e-bike designs‚ reach serious speeds (some versions do not lose thrust until 45 km/h) without the stigmas of being clumsy, unsightly, or retiree mobility focused transport tools that had once limited the attractiveness of e-bikes to some buyer segments.

In the Lebanese market, retailer Bike Generation says they sold somewhere north of 120 e-bikes over the past five to six years. As Bike Generation co-founder Georges Bouez tells Executive, the market here has rational potentials for use of e-bikes in commuting. He concedes, however, that this potential is still restrained by apprehensions about e-bike prices—which are high in comparison to mass-market conventional bicycles but actually, at $3,000 to $9,000 for an imported machine, are not exorbitant when one takes a look at what some e-bikes go for in European countries—and by misperceptions that a bicycle is exclusively for leisure and not suited for daily transport to work.

Then there is an entire realm with heavy electric mobility disruption potentials in micro-commercial and personal urban transport. This realm extends on one side from e-versions of transport scooters to three-wheeled vehicles used on private properties such as hospital and university grounds. E-mobility in this segment can ease transportation of goods and persons in specific environments, but they appear to be in need of clear allocations on what spaces they can circulate and also better regulations as to which uses require what safety precautions, driver training, and insurance covers.

The same need applies to the adjacent mobility segments of electric kick-scooters and e-versions of conventional scooters, the latter long having acquired a well-deserved reputation of being threats to any organized and rule abiding traffic in Lebanon.

There is an entire realm with heavy electric mobility disruption potentials in micro-commerical and personal urban transport.

Constituting additional options for urban personal mobility around the world’s cities (and arriving with the concomitant news of accidents involving electric kick-scooters), these fast-rolling stand-on mini-vehicles, which are jumping from being mobility toys of preschoolers to choices of grown-up urbanites, could emerge as the layer of one-risk-too-far in local traffic if they are not subjected to adequate regulatory frameworks and actual enforcement of such frameworks. Similarly, an increase in the population of electric scooters in Lebanon might easily become the new menace dimension of obnoxious and no-rules-respected delivery guys that make streets in any Lebanese city become risk accumulation cauldrons.

In short, all these realms of new, up-scaled, and old mobility bring added risks, and although these diversified transport and mobility options tend to bring benefits and perhaps increase urban productivity, the expectation will only have merit if Lebanon’s national and municipal frameworks of informal traffic conduct, formal regulations, and effective and respectful enforcement are seriously enhanced.

Without even embarking on a discussion of what mid-term future scenarios involving e-trucks and e-buses, autonomous delivery fleets, taxis, and goods or passenger drones could mean for Lebanon, the digital mobility scenario that is starting to solidify here is one of a transitional sense—meaning not one of economic determinism or dialectical paradigms. The chick of the new digital mobility is contained in the egg of the country’s existing mobility; namely the, historically unprecedented, progress inducing but also problem-laden 20th century mobility. The emergence of the new will be a challenge, and it will take all the investments of structure and sanity that Lebanon’s state institutions can muster.

The most eye-catching developments in mobility involve cars. The world is filled with cars; many of us sit in these machines for inordinate lengths of time every day. Surveys done in recent years in the United States found that the average person might spend upward of 17,500 minutes per year at the steering wheel or about the same as seven full work weeks, according to a 2016 study by the American Automobile Association; an academic study in 2007 assessed the average time spent driving by US residents as about one hour and 20 minutes per day, which makes almost 36,000 minutes annually.

Such “average Joe” observations have a zillion weaknesses and are hardly useful when Joseph or Jeanette is stuck in a traffic jam that has no right to exist. But it seems fully reasonable to say that a lifetime in the late 20th and early 21st century is a lifetime with a lot of driving and a lot of time wasted in traffic, as well as other auto-related hassles. If not a driver themselves, pretty much everyone in the world uses or is confronted with cars on a frequent basis, and even the most spiritually focused stylite or eremite in the desert would be hard pressed if she wanted to live with a vow of not setting eyes on passing vehicles.

As our obsession with cars and motorized mobility is shifting to new considerations that stretch from autonomous vehicles and flying taxis to everyday cars that no longer rely exclusively on internal combustion engines, the question of electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) is capturing the attention of the car-crazy population. This topic of EVs has two parts, however, the first part talking of the latest cars featuring the technology and the second talking about the problems of building an EV charging infrastructure.

Although PEVs and EVs had become surprisingly successful in markets elsewhere, few such vehicles made appearances here.

The question on how to charge EVs rapidly enough and cheaply enough so that electric cars make sense has been at the core of the electric mobility debate since the first hybrids came to market in the late 1990s and specifically since maverick US maker Tesla early in the current decade commercially launched a first pure EV, the Model S, that made every competitor look old. The issue of infrastructure commands so much attention because even if an electric car can be charged fully by plugging it overnight into a power outlet in the owner’s garage, this does not answer half of the what-if questions that even a technical dummy can immediately conjure.

Fundamental questions

What if you need to drive your EV for a longer distance than facilitated by an overnight charge? What if you do not have the luxury of charging for several hours? What if you do not have a garage? What if you do not have electricity at the place where you usually park your car? It is an elementary calculation that electric mobility requires some sort of an infrastructure which, to be really functional, needs to be purpose-built.

After all, a car is a wholly different gadget from your personal smartphone that needs a regular battery charge. Car and phone will both be dead if out of battery, but that is where the similarities diverge. Even the contemporary person with the most stone-age brain gets this, not to mention the highly developed Lebanese brain that has over decades been supercharged in mental ability to incessantly think of electricity supply problems and be ready for them.

In engineering, operational, and economic terms, there are trade-offs between the technology used to augment or substitute a car’s combustion engine with an electric drive. Larger batteries have greater reach but are heavier and cost more, and complex technical solutions have to be deployed to address this triangular challenge whether the car is a pure EV, a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) designed for external electrical charging in combination with in-drive charging through a combustion engine, or a quasi-internal hybrid (HEV) where all the charging comes from the combustion engine that works as a motor/generator in tandem with an auxiliary electric motor. On operational terms, hybrids are happy with supplies of fossil fuels alone while PHEV and EV owners will want to have access to some sort of external electric charge unit. In terms of economy, more tech and more battery power both carry costs that are difficult to offset when a vehicle is used sparingly.

The Lebanese environment

In Lebanon, electricity is a touchy issue that very often engenders people to break out in lengthy and passionate tirades. Also, politicians have been known to vacillate between making ludicrous excuses for electricity problems and untenable promises that do not address when and how affordably problems might be solved. In between citizen complaints and political debates, electricity issues lead minds to erupt in confrontations filled with arguments that seem driven by passion more than by reason.

In this constellation of existing for decades with poor power realities, when global public attention began turning to e-mobility around 2012, the idea of seeing electric cars on Lebanese streets looked for the next five years like a concept that was completely out of this world. Although PEVs and EVs had become surprisingly successful in markets elsewhere and had gained measurable market shares, few such vehicles made appearances in local traffic.

When Executive produced its 2017 special report on the country’s automotive realities, we therefore felt compelled to note that the government until this time had missed out on providing incentives for electric cars—there was a “total absence of a legal framework that would boost the import and sales of hybrid cars or EVs,” as one contributor observed. In response to this state of affairs, Executive called in the October 2017 issue’s leader for “things such as green auto loans, insurance discounts for EVs, recharge stations at hypermarkets, and free EV parking at malls.”

To give credit where credit is due: Since the time of this report, Lebanon’s government, lobbied by members in the country’s automobile importers’ association (Association des Importateurs d’Automobiles au Liban – AIA) introduced incentives for electric car ownership by liberating EVs fully from various duties and by granting reduced customs and fees also for hybrids.

And as this magazine’s editors noticed with surprised glee, in 2018, not only did the first quick-charge units for EVs make their first appearances at Medco gas stations, but also several highly desirable and visible parking spots at three malls in town had turned bright green, with the message that they were reserved to EVs (and offered charging options).

“Having established the seven units, we approached car importers to see about their plans and saw that our move encouraged them to proceed as they had read in many articles that the main issue for bringing EVs to the road is the infrastructure for charging them.”

Nicolas Abou Halka, general manager of Medco’s lubricants and bunkering business unit

Then, in spring 2019, EV import launch events became hot social items on the local calendar, and Beirut saw its first e-Motor show in the middle of April. It was a small-scale show when viewed against an exhausting and e-heavy mobility feast such as the (similarly timed) 2019 Auto Shanghai show with its 1,000 exhibitors and 1,500 presented vehicles (Industry predictions say that China will have about 1.6 to 1.8 million sales of EVs and HEVs in 2019, representing a share of 6.7 percent in the car market.)

Nonetheless, Beirut staged a sort of mini Shangri-La of greener mobility where some 18 different electric cars, from posh SUVs and limousines to compact and subcompact urban hoppers, were on show alongside e-golf carts, e-tuktuks, Chinese-made but locally-branded scooters, as well as sharing-economy scooters (brought in from Canada) and European-made e-bicycles (urban and cross-country models).

Sparked with curiosity about the new impulses for the Lebanese mobility future, Executive researched the latest EV developments among automotive importers and, to better assess the important question of electric charging options and supporting infrastructure for electric driving, contacted gas station operating companies with avowed electrification agendas.

The new chargers

It appeared from Executive’s research that Medco, importer and distributor of oil products and gas station operator in Lebanon, decided some years ago to investigate electric charging units for EVs and PEVs in Lebanon with an eye to enhancing its long-term commercial strategy and also its communication with the market. According to Nicolas Abou Halka, general manager of Medco’s lubricants and bunkering business unit, the group’s board of directors decided earlier in the 2010s to undertake an investigation into the electric charging infrastructure.

Abou Halka says he pursued the task through research and by establishing connections with French companies with expertise in EV charging technologies. Medco then decided to import some specialized charging equipment, and while the material was still en route from Europe, the company was fortuitous to witness the Lebanese government introduce incentives for EV ownership. The equipment was installed by Medco in four Beirut gas stations and in the parking structures of three upscale shopping malls.

For Abou Halka, this sparked interest from the local automotive sector. “Having established the seven units, we approached car importers to see about their plans and saw that our move encouraged them to proceed as they had read in many articles that the main issue for bringing EVs to the road is the infrastructure for charging them,” he tells Executive. “We have offered them this infrastructure, and they have only to bring in the cars and sell them, after which the car users can come to the stations and charge.”

For oil importing company IPT, the entry point into the issue originated with the company’s focus on sustainability. IPT inaugurated a solar-powered EV charging unit in conjunction with what it described as the company’s first fully sustained gas station in late spring 2019, explains Vice Chairman/General Manager Toni Issa, who emphasizes that this sustainability strategy is the root of the economic direction taken by IPT.

“We are not waiting to have the electric cars in order to transform ourselves. We are transforming ourselves into [a] sustainable [group of] companies in various ways and methods,” he says energetically. At the same time, Issa, like Abou Halka, is fundamentally upbeat on the electric play in automotive mobility and importance of the supporting infrastructure in the country. “The use of hybrid and electric vehicles will certainly grow in the coming few years in Lebanon, especially after the incentives given by the Lebanese state that reduce customs duties and excise taxes on imports,” he adds.

Issa says that there is no clear visibility on the scope of the coming EV penetration, naming as reasons external factors such as cost and technical barriers encountered by global manufacturers as well as internal issues in Lebanon such as insufficient awareness of EVs, local cost barriers, and the need to measure the impacts and implications for the national electricity system and for the environment. “The first thing to do is to assess the impact of deploying EVs on the electric grid in terms of capacity and load, and [the related] environmental impact under consideration of the fact that we still rely on fuel oil and diesel oil to produce energy,” he explains.

Despite his confidence in the proposition of electric mobility, and despite his commitment to not rely on pollution-heavy power sources but rather use a renewable energy source, Issa acknowledges that IPT has to invest more into a solar-powered charging unit than is required for a conventional grid-based unit. He concedes further that IPT currently has no clear plan yet as to the commercial rollout of solar EV charging units as the whole project is still under trial and is nowhere near generating profit. “We are sure that the market is growing from what we are witnessing, but we are not sure about at what time the demand will justify the investment that we are doing,” he tells Executive.

For Medco, the experience of working with the adaptation of various charging solutions for EVs in public spaces provided insightful lessons on the current technical and regulatory barriers that companies have to deal with when they embark on provision of fast charges to automobiles.

Different systems (AC and DC), different plug and socket designs and standards used in Europe and the US versus Japan and China (two existing main solutions are known as combo and chademo), different battery sizes and battery technologies, varying on-board power transmission capacities of cars, and different conditions at each gas station in Lebanon, in terms of electricity supply and grid connection, translate for Abou Halka into investment needs that can be upwards of $50,000 for EV charging units in commercial gas station environments. According to him, installation of less versatile and powerful charging units in places where an EV can park longer and infrastructure designed for mall operations are not as expensive or complex.

“Probably unintentionally, the taxation regulation on electric vehicles is greatly favoring the most expensive cars for which very high custom duties are due.”

Abou Halka

As to the company’s strategy for developing its charging network, the manager says that Medco is preparing to equip several stations on major Lebanese traffic arteries outside of core Beirut with a new and more powerful generation of charge units. The company will deploy these ultra-charge units in 2019, Abou Halka promises. “We will be starting to put these into operations in the second half of this year,” he says. “We will double the number of [charge] units, so that hopefully by end 2019 there will be 15 units spread all over the country, [with the new ones located] along the main axes to the north, south, and east.”

He also points to yet untapped potentials that electric mobility could provide in the Lebanese market, specifically to operators of taxis and commercial vehicles, such as buses and trucks. While he vigorously supports the engagement of the government in incentivizing EV and HEV ownerships, and also sees the need for greater public involvement in the specific infrastructure development of charging stations, he also notes some side effects. “Probably unintentionally, the taxation regulation on electric vehicles is greatly favoring the most expensive cars for which very high custom duties are due,” he says.

“People who buy a premium car with electric configuration will be compensated by the waiver of the customs duties and so what one might see from next year are many more luxurious cars that are electric cars than small EVs.” (Economists like to describe such public sector interferences as the provision of perverse incentives.

Not discounting the fact that provision of commercial charging units is not looking be economical for several years—neither on the level of gas stations nor on the level of charging stations at shopping malls—Abou Halka concludes that a company wanting to be active in the automotive field in the long term will have to take courageous decisions and embark on a journey by starting somewhere and learning by doing. He says, “In the medium term, within the next five years, I think there is a potential for an expansion of the electric car population in Lebanon, provided that the problem of batteries and the high cost of batteries will be solved.”

Public transport is part of Lebanon’s mobility heritage, as is evident by our popular culture. In the song entitled “Ala Hadir el-Bosta,” the late Joseph Sakr sings of his love Alia’s pretty eyes while on a shared bus from Hammana to Tannourine, humorously describing the passengers who were with him—the song was composed by Ziad el-Rahbani in 1978 for his play “Bil Nisbe La Bukra Shu?” Marcel Khalife also sings about shared transport in “Toot toot ala Beirut,” where a young boy asks his father to take him to Beirut in a service (a Lebanese shared taxi). A popular Lebanese children’s rhyme encourages the bus driver to accelerate to 199 km/h without worrying that this will get him in trouble with the police as the children will have his back.

Songs and rhymes aside, images of the tramway passing through Bliss Street in the 1950s, or of the train running through the coastal plains, are still shared on Lebanon’s nostalgia social media pages and evoked in photography exhibitions of the country’s recent past.

Despite this well-developed history of mobility, a casual observer of Lebanon’s roads today—noting the buses, minivans, and services all stopping to pick up passengers anywhere and anytime they please—would not be faulted for thinking that the country has never experienced organized public transport of any kind. And yet, there is a certain rhythm to the existing madness, as well as emerging plans for the organization of the public transport sector which will eventually—hopefully—revitalize and restore mobility within Lebanon.

A brief history of buses

Ziad Nasr, president and director general of the Railways and Public Transportation Authority (RPTA), explains that with the intensification of the civil war in Lebanon, public transport infrastructure was eventually destroyed. The post civil war government’s immediate priorities were to rebuild the airport and fix the roads to reconnect the country externally and internally, Nasr explains—as such public transport rehabilitation fell through the cracks. Since then, “there were several proposed projects to revive the railway system or rehabilitate public transport, but there was no real political will or a ministerial decree to invest in them and implement them,” Nasr says.

One project that was implemented—but was not very successful—was the RPTA (also known by its French abbreviation OCFTC) owned blue and white buses that were introduced into Beirut in 1995. At the time, a fleet of 200 buses were introduced into Beirut, running on 22 lines, and 806 bus stops were constructed across the city.

“The informal public transport system fills the gap where it is found and answers the need of a certain segment of society.”

Chadi Farraj, co-founder of the Bus Map Project

However, according to Tammam Nakkash, managing partner of Team International, an engineering and management consultancy, who was contracted for this project, they faced a lot of competition from the non-regulated buses and minivans. Nasr believes the lack of consistent funding into their maintenance and into the system itself was another reason the buses were not successful as they would breakdown and there would be no funds to fix them.

“Public transport planning is not simply to have a driver and a bus, but also to have a back office which plays the role of planning and supervision,” Nasr says, adding that only 35 of these buses are still in operation today across nine lines or routes in Beirut and one in the Bekaa.

When nature abhors vacuum

Chadi Farraj, co-founder of the Bus Map Project (see box below), a grassroots initiative that maps public transport in the Greater Beirut Area (GBA), says there are two models of public transport system: formal and informal. The formal system is where vehicles have one operator—a private entity or the government—and run on a fixed schedule with designated bus stops; the kind encountered in most developed cities around the world. The second model is the informal one and is more commonly found in developing cities such as Bangkok, Manila, Amman, and Beirut, where a formal or organized public transport system does not exist.

“The informal bus system fills the gap where it is found and answers the need of a certain segment of society [the low-income to lower middle-income segment], so there are many versions of it across the world,” Farraj says. “It operates wherever there is demand, is organic, and makes the best use of what exists. There is no schedule or bus stop in the informal system, and it does not have a unified operator but rather a series of individual operators.”

Nasr acknowledges that with the lack of government provided and regulated public transport, it was only a matter of time before private sector alternatives were developed in a haphazard manner, explaining that this is exactly what is happening with other services meant to be provided by the government like water or electricity—where the private sector is also stepping in given the absence of public sector provision. This lack of regulation has led to a chaotic public transport system that compounds congestion across the country and specifically in the GBA, Nasr says.

Nakkash says the public transport situation in Lebanon can best be described as, “a loosely regulated transport system; loosely in that the existing rules and regulations are not enforced 100 percent, plus the whole regulatory system is deficient.” He explains that in metropolitan areas the size of Beirut there usually is a transport authority body that regulates public transport in the area. While the RPTA could be charged with this role, the fact that they own and operate public transport buses makes it problematic for them to be regulators, in Nakkash’s opinion. “The government should get out from providing the service and play a regulatory role that only the government can play,” he says.

The red plate district

Underlining this chaotic sector is the fact that, in total, there are 23 different syndicates for public transport drivers, alongside six unions.

What compounds the chaotic feel of the informal public transport sector in Lebanon is the system of red registration plates that drivers can obtain from the Traffic and Vehicle Management Authority (TVMA) under the Ministry of Interior (MoI). These registration plates are tradable assets that can be bought and sold, explains Nakkash, and so are a big part of the public transport problem in Lebanon. “Because of this system, organizing the needs for public transport of Beirut or Tripoli or any city based on location is not easily achievable as you cannot control or dictate where the driver operates,” he explains.

As per official data, there are currently 55,236 red plates registered with the TVMA, according to Ali Mohieddine, head of the Syndicate of Public Transport Vehicle Operators, which has over 40,000 registered members. Underlining this chaotic sector is the fact that, in total, there are 23 different syndicates for public transport drivers, alongside six unions. Using numbers from the TVMA, Mohieddine says the plates are divided among public transport vehicles as follows: 33,000 cars, 4,000 vans or minibuses, 2,236 24-seater buses for public transport, and 16,000 freight trucks.

All those to whom Executive spoke, say that the number of public transport vehicles in Lebanon is significantly higher than the number of licensed vehicle plates provided by the TVMA. The last time the TVMA issued new red registration plates was back in 1994; the abundance of red plates seen on the streets today is partly due to the widespread forgery, with duplicate registration plates in circulation. Mohieddine says that based on the syndicate members’ estimations, more than half the public transport vehicles in operation have forged plates or are driving without license plates in remote areas out of the GBA. A 2017 UNDP study estimated that there are 17,000 illegally procured and operated taxis in circulation. Aside from saturating the market, forged plates are dangerous in case of accidents or security issues, as allocating blame becomes impossible, Nakkash explains. Nakkash and Mohieddine both believe that those who are bold enough to use duplicate registration plates are politically-backed.

The MoI issued new designs for the red registration places in 2017, which all registered public transport vehicles should shift over to by the end of 2019. The move was partially intended to curb the number duplicate plates used by unlicensed public transport vehicles as the new design is harder to replicate, according to a statement by Huda Salloum, head of the TVMA. Mohieddine explains that this move is a step in the right direction by the MoI as the new license plates can only be obtained from the TVMA and so only registered cars can make the switch; cars with duplicate or forged plates are unable to secure a new plate, which could explain why a big percentage of public transport vehicles still have the old red plates with only six months to go on the deadline.

Buses for all

Chaos and corruption aside, Lebanon’s informal public transport sector has its own problems. Nasr says that because public transport is provided by profit-driven private operators, areas with the highest demand are over served, whereas more remote areas have little or no access to public transport—those living further away from the GBA have less public transport options. If public transport was provided by the state, says Nasr, then all areas of Lebanon would have to have equal access to it as a public right. Nakkash says that the informal system cannot even be called a system in his opinion, as it does not run on a reliable fixed schedule or frequency.

There is also the public perception that all of these buses and minivans are in bad condition, are badly driven, and are only used by those who absolutely cannot afford a car or cab, although Farraj says this is all exaggerated. “We should break the stigma of riding buses,” he says. “A small percentage of buses are rundown and some lines do feel like they are managed by a cartel, but this is not true across the board.

“When there is a stigma regarding the public system, people will believe anything: If there is only one bus that is broken, the perception is that it is all broken.”

A beautiful mess

For all its faults, the informal public transport system manages to get a nearly impossible job done; it takes people to their destinations, despite the congested roads, in an affordable and efficient manner—a bus ride within Beirut costs LL1,000 ($0.66).

Although the perception is that there is no structure to how the informal system of buses and minivans run, two initiatives—the Bus Map Project and YallaBus—have demonstrated otherwise by mapping out the bus lines in the GBA. Farraj explains that the GBA is divided into lines or bus routes that are identifiable by number. This system was developed in 1995—with the aforementioned white and blue buses—and at the time there were 22 bus lines within the GBA, says Farraj. While no official data exists, Farraj says that more lines have been added since then, as urbanization increased the areas that needed public transport.

Each line has an average of 30 buses or minivans running on it with roughly fixed intervals—around 10 minutes—between each deployment. Within the city, the 12-seater minibuses or vans are proving more successful than the 24-seater buses. As Farraj explains, operators realized that vans go faster in Beirut’s narrow streets and fill up quicker, enabling them to do more trips in less time. Operators also priced them competitively, at LL1,000 per ride anywhere in the GBA.

Therese Keyrouz, cofounder of YallaBus, says that bus lines within the GBA tend to have one main operator or rayess who owns the vehicles in the line and pays the drivers a daily fee for their service. Buses that take passengers to and from the GBA are usually individually owned and drivers/owners decide on the frequency of deployment through a gentleman’s agreement, says Keyrouz. Bus drivers commuting intra-city also communicate with their frequent passengers to eventually develop a timetable that works for all, she explains. (The nature of the informal system makes it very hard to pin down its operators, as they are disparate and mostly unregistered, with no authoritative source to go to for answers.)

While the informal public transport system is clearly far from perfect, a considerable number of people rely on it for their daily commutes.

Then there is the model of privately-owned companies that operate more or less organized public transport generally from and to Beirut. Connexion, which runs between Beirut and Tripoli, is one such example: its buses are air-conditioned, well-maintained, and have Wi-Fi; they also run on fixed schedules and make few stops along the way. Although Connexion has a higher fee than a van (LL5,000 for a one way ride as compared to LL2,000 with a minivan or bus), some do not mind forking it over for some extra measure of comfort.

By the numbers

While the informal public transport system is clearly far from perfect, a considerable number of people rely on it for their daily commutes. Based on her field research, Keyrouz estimates that each bus in operation within the informal bus system carries an average of 200 riders per day.
Some lines have more demand than others. Farraj also conducted field research on line number 5—that runs from Hamra to Ain Saade in Mount Lebanon—and estimated that its 24-seater buses carry 3,500 passengers per day on their average three round trips per day. According to a 2016 study by Petra Samaha and Amr Mohtar, then students at the American University of Beirut, the minivans on line number 4—that runs on a high demand route between Hamra and Hadath—carry 5,600 passengers per day. Louai Halabi, director of Connexion says their 24 buses run on a daily occupancy of 80 percent with each bus making two round trips per day.

While Lebanon’s current informal public transport system is a far cry from the organized and thriving formal system the country enjoyed in the pre-civil war days, it still functions, despite the obstacles and despite its obvious flaws. There are a lot of improvements that could be done to this system, and yet its relative success in transporting passengers efficiently should be noted when planning for the new models of formal public transport systems soon to be introduced to Lebanon (see article page 30).