Most of the last 100 years’ rarest road-going vehicles are coachbuilt automobiles, bespoke one-offs, and ridiculously exclusive supercars you’ll almost certainly never see in real life. Unexpected among these rarest vehicles is the Citroën U55 Currus Cityrama, a double-decker bus that easily takes the crown of weirdest bus ever built. I mean, there’s not a single angle of this thing that doesn’t capture your attention. This beauty is the last of its kind and thankfully, an organization is putting it back together. One day, you might be able to join me in a journey through bus history.

Buses are reliable workhorses that don’t get as much credit as they should. Every day, countless examples of these metal tubes operate around the world getting people to work and back home again. Most of the time, the form of the bus closely follows its function, leading to some truly forgettable designs. Can you even picture what one of your local transit buses looks like? Ok, I can, but that’s because I’m solidly a nerd.

It wasn’t always this way. Several decades ago, buses were highly functional but they were also works of art in their own right. There are vintage buses that I’d rather look at over any Ferrari. The iconic GMC New Look fits into that category for me, though that might be my weirdness showing through.

When a bus tour company wanted to stand out in the competitive market of the 1950s, it made the bold move of commissioning custom buses that looked like nothing else on the road. The Citroën U55 Currus Cityrama was the result. It was a hit, but like most buses, it was seen simply as a tool of commerce, not a work of art or embodiment of history worth preserving. Once their service lives were over, the Cityrama buses were unceremoniously discarded. Somehow, just one example survived and is being restored in an ongoing, years-long process by a French historical society.

I first wrote about the bus in 2022 when the bus was still believed to have been lost. Then I wrote about it later that year when the bus was found. Now, we have great news as progress on its restoration is moving along.

This update comes to us from one of my favorite YouTubers, The Tim Traveller. If you don’t know Tim, he’s a charming fellow who explores Europe for some of the weirdest and coolest transportation and culture artifacts. Sometimes his videos document the triumph of a soccer team with a multi-decade losing streak, some sweet French tunnels, or the largest vehicle ever built. His videos are short and are always worth a watch. In a way, Tim’s work reminds me of what YouTube used to be, you know, before the invasion of 30-minute videos where there’s only five minutes of real content.

Anyway, I’m getting beside myself here. Tim recently updated a lovely video detailing everything that’s happened to the weirdest bus in the world since it was found:

Why It’s So Weird

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I don’t blame you. It’s been nearly three years since we last had an update on the bus and I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting it even existed. Here’s some history from my last entry:

Back in the 1950s, Paris tour company Groupe Cityrama commissioned a fleet of wild buses. There’s little information out there about these buses, but the story is believed to go like this: Groupe Cityrama launched in 1956 as a tourism company in Paris, France. Paris tourism is highly competitive, so the company decided to go far out to get attention. Cityrama’s plan to be different was to have a fleet of distinctive sightseeing buses.

Under the massive glass greenhouses of these buses sat a Citroën Type 55 utility truck chassis. These workhorses featured either 4.6-liter gasoline sixes making 73 HP or 5.2-liter diesel sixes producing 86 HP. The Type 55 launched in 1953 and was produced all of the way to 1965. These trucks acted as platforms for fire engines, flatbeds and…five to ten strange sightseeing buses.

To bus-ify the Type 55, Cityrama took the truck chassis to Currus, a French coachbuilder. There, Currus built the incredible body that you see here on top of the humble Citroën trucks. As Tim originally noted, Currus had the challenge of making a double-decker bus that was both mostly glass and looked like nothing else.

What Currus built was nothing short of extraordinary. Just look at the Cityrama bus and you keep finding new and fascinating things about it. For example, take a look at the rear end and you’ll notice that it has giant tailfins like so many cars of the era. Yes, tailfins on a bus!

Directly above the tailfins is a rounded observation area at the back of the bus and a red character line that starts up front and then terminates at the roof, almost resembling the handle of a basket.

Meanwhile, the front of the bus looks like the bow of a ship, and just above the first deck is a long spear. The rest of the bus is just two decks of metal and glass. Those on the upper deck not only got a better vantage point for sightseeing, but they also sat under a large glass canopy with a removable top.

Inside the Cityrama tour bus, up to 50 tourists could be provided headsets that broadcast commentary in a variety of languages. Now, these features aren’t all that special today when most tour buses are double-decker affairs with open tops, but this was pretty forward-thinking for the late 1950s.

The quirky bus was an instant hit, thrusting Cityrama’s status as the tour operator to go with if you went to Paris. Even when Cityrama picked up Saviem coaches beginning in 1960, the U55s remained highly popular. Everyone loved the U55s so much that they made appearances in French media, including French movie Zazie dans le Métro, where these sort of blurry screenshots originated.

Unfortunately, the unique design of these buses also led to some issues, reportedly. As noted by Tim and other sources, the buses had overheating problems and one even caught fire. Cityrama tried to fix the hot buses with the addition of a second grille, a third grille, and then an oil cooler. But as it turns out, the small and slow Citroën U55 just didn’t take well to being built into a glass monstrosity.

Despite that, Cityrama managed to get over 20 years of use out of the buses, finally retiring them around 1980 or so. It’s now believed that only three buses were ever built. Of those, one was last seen working for a circus before it disappeared. Then there’s this one, which was the last one built in 1959. It was found in a very sorry state in 2022. A private owner saved the bus from the scrapper in the early 2000s, then hid the bus away for two decades before driving it out to a classic car meet in 2022. That’s right, it still ran and drove!

Sadly, this Cityrama bus has been through a lot. When it was found it was missing most of its windows, its body panels were falling off, the paint was a disaster, and the interior was a minefield of jagged edges just looking to cut you up. And yet, there was great news. The dilapidated Citroën bus went into the possession of the Association Normande d’Anciens Utilitaires, which figured the restoration would take four or five years.

Tim says the bus is currently in about 100 different pieces. The engine is sitting pretty in a corner, the steering gear is sitting on a shelf. Normandy Classics completely tore the bus down so every single part could be restored or replaced. In the video, a man named Jimmy explains that Normandy Classics bought a second engine for parts and used what they got from both engines to make one good engine. As Jimmy explains, the goal is to use as many original parts as possible. They’re not in the business of making an entirely new bus, after all.

Thankfully, the Citroën U55 was a common truck, making parts for the platform easier to find. What has been hard was all of the custom bits, so the body, windows, interior, and everything else. All of those parts were shuffled off to a warehouse a few kilometers away where the people of Normandy Classics have been toiling away at rebuilding the bus.

Tim notes that while Normandy Classics mentioned a timeline of four to five years, the restoration couldn’t actually begin until enough funds were raised to start the process. Sadly, this meant that the restoration didn’t even begin until fall 2023, which is why the bus doesn’t look very far along now.

The shop explains that along with gutting the bus and inventorying the parts, it was also sanded down to bare metal. Any metal that can’t be saved due to rust will be cut out, with new pieces welded in. This process is more difficult than it appears, as the owner of Normandy Classics says that the upper deck structure has to come down before they go all Sawzall Hero on the rusted-out pieces of the lower deck.

It’s noted that this sounds simple, but it really isn’t. The shop has to make sure the structure can support all of the weight of people, steel, and glass.

As of now, Normandy Classics has completed rebuilding the drivetrain and restoring the chassis. In addition to restoring the bus, the team hopes to make the bus better than new with modern rustproofing technology and improved engine cooling.

If you’re interested in watching the project’s progress, stop by the “Restoration of the U55 Currus Cityrama” Facebook page. If you want to donate, that page is here. As of publishing, the project has gathered over 91,000 Euros!

Hopefully, four or five years from now, the sole surviving Cityrama tour bus will be back on the road and carrying passengers once again. When that happens it will be a triumph. The bus will be over 70 years old and bringing people smiles once again. You can bet I’ll be there when it happens.

The post This Is The Weirdest Bus Ever Built And It’s Being Brought Back To Life So You Can Ride It appeared first on The Autopian.

Nothing great!

I was going to write a longer and more serious piece about this, and who knows, later I might, but right now I’m behind on a book deadline and it has priority. Nevertheless, I would feel remiss not at least posting some bit of commentary about this now. So, briefly, here it is:

We let back into office a corrupt, rage-filled actual criminal felon and sex offender who cannot be punished for “official acts,” elected on a platform of bigotry, oligarchy and graft. This administration will live down to all of that, and fast.

Or if that’s too complicated:

You fucked around, US voters. Now you’re gonna find out.

(“I didn’t vote for him!” Well, thank you, neither did I. Got some bad news for you, though.)

If you did vote for him, congratulations, you have likely traded what little safety net and good governance we have in the US for a chance to be mean to immigrants, trans people and Californians. Enjoy your tariffs! You do understand that you will have to pay for them, yes?

On the other hand, you are very likely to have handed me and other well-off folks yet another substantial tax cut, so thanks for that. Bear in mind, you won’t get anything, or not enough to matter, unless you’re already rich. But you sure told Kamala Harris to fuck off, so you have that going for you, which is nice.

None of this is a surprise. Trump and his pals didn’t hide any of this. People who were voting for him knew what they were getting when they pulled the lever. If they didn’t, that was on them, alas for the rest of us.

I could be wrong about this, mind you. I would be happy to be wrong! But I wasn’t wrong the last time. This time is going to be worse.

A lot worse.

(Unless you’re already rich! In which case you’ll (possibly) be (somewhat more) insulated from a lot of the worst of it, at least economically. But, you know, there’s a reason why they call the richest Americans “the one percent.” If you’re part of that other ninety-nine, well. Hey, did you know that the 1% in the US have twelve times the wealth of the bottom 50% of all Americans, and almost as much as the entire bottom 90%? Who do you think all the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet care about more?)

Anyway, the next four years at least are probably gonna suck real bad, and even in the best case scenario we’re likely going to spend all the rest of the time I’m alive recovering from it. Again, it’s not great! But it is what the plurality of the US voters wanted. So, here we go.

— JS

Every major event now comes with a layer of bullshit. Instead of coming together to address both the needs of people struck by tragedy and the deeper roots of the problem, we’re faced with a manufactured storm of bigotry and conspiracy layered on top of floods, fires, any sort of devastation. For these LA fires there are, as is too often the case now, too many streams of misinformation to identify them all. But one stands out because of its sheer stupidity, and because of what it shows about the people and ideology we’re up against: the targeting of firefighters.

In a way, this latest narrative is the same tired story we’ve heard again and again. A plane crashes or a neighborhood burns and the same people immediately start chanting “DEI, DEI!” But there is something different here. In the middle of a catastrophic fire they decided to level these chants against firefighters, of all people. They saw a queer woman leading the LA fire department and immediately found their target. Stochastic terrorist Chaya Reichik, who runs the account Libs of TikTok, posted, “Don’t you hate it when climate change appoints a DEI hire to run the fire dept.” I, who occasionally think myself incapable of being shocked by the torrent of hate and lies from every fascist mouthpiece, found myself surprised. They’re going after universally recognized heroes in the middle of fighting massive fires?

But then Elon Musk, with his usual tact, began to give the game away. As Rachel Leingang reported for The Guardian: “Elon Musk, the owner of X and a frequent spreader of misinformation, claimed: ‘They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes.’” But then, in a response to Libs of TikTok, Musk wrote: “Wild theory: maybe, just maybe, the root cause wasn’t climate change?” At first he sticks with the DEI line, but then he ultimately can’t help himself. He has to reveal that the real priority is discounting the reality of climate change, even as seven months of drought and remarkably strong January winds cause multiple disastrous fires.

Does a man like Elon Musk genuinely hate women, people of color, and queer people? Most definitely. Does he also want to build fascist power in this country, and is he willing to scapegoat anyone and everyone to reach that goal? Certainly. Wealth and power are so important to him that he’s pivoted away from the accepted science on climate change, once central to his electric car business, and is now to the point of attacking women firefighters.

The bigger question than the motives of a greedy fascist loser like Elon Musk is why so many people, mostly men, are willing to join him. As an over-consumer of social media, I’m exposed to this particular genre of man more often than I’d like. We know that Musk shifted the culture of Twitter such that denigration and objectification of women is not only commonplace, but elevated for all to see. And Zuck is in the process of doing the same on his platforms. Every video made by a woman on Instagram is already littered with replies remarking on the OnlyFans she must have, which apparently negates everything she has to say. Young men flood the platform to look at beautiful women while simultaneously talking down to them. These boys and men have been told, both implicitly and increasingly explicitly, that this is what they must do to announce their masculinity — that their worth is premised on their denigration of women.

I doubt this will reach those guys, those young men in particular, but I’d like to be able to reach you. I hope one of you who feels the urge to put women in their place by leaving a comment on her Instagram sees this. I know you probably won’t, and I know that the first couple paragraphs might’ve turned you off if you did click. But I hope at least one of you saw Elon Musk blaming firefighters in the middle of these wildfires and thought, “Wait, what the fuck is he doing?”

I hope you’re reading this because it doesn’t have to be this way. Men don’t have to trade the false feeling of superiority you get from a social media comment, which lasts for about thirty seconds, for the future of the planet. Because that’s the deal being made right now, whether you know it or not. Zuck wants you typing at women who don’t know you exist while he consolidates power. Musk wants you to hate women saving lives in California while he teams up with politicians to take away your rights and your money.

This is how it’s always been. Fascists have always used sexism and misogyny to build their power, while they take yours, all of ours. As Ewa Majewska says, “I think that people don't know that historically fascists have always been anti-feminist. They were building their notion of masculinity based on virility, strength, power, heroism, self-sacrificing heroicism. Therefore femininity has always been not only the weak, but also that which refuses sacrifice because she has, for instance, others to take care of. This has historically always been very present in fascism.”

Nazi Germany provides one of the clearer examples of all this. Ruchira Gupta, writing about how feminism and women fared under Hitler, lays it out:

Gupta goes on to say much more, explaining that women were expected to birth children and then care for those children and her husband, and that was it. Today, that same strand still runs through fascism. In Argentina, the current fascist president Javier Milei ran in part on opposing abortion and shutting down the ministry of women, gender and diversity, as Anna-Catherine Brigida reports.

And since taking power, in addition to attacking women, Milei has hurt everyone. He’s privatized government services, selling out the public to enrich a few multinational corporations and the super-rich. In a supposed bid to tackle inflation, which is really about a desire to take a chainsaw to the government and turn everything into for-profit businesses instead of public goods, Milei has slashed government spending, laid off government workers, and frozen all public works projects. Inflation is down since its record high earlier in his term, but poverty is up — the poverty rate now sits at 50%.

Fascists, then and now, claim to offer countries stability and security. But these days the far right is more interested in stripping governments for parts, creating the economic instability it claims to address. The erosion of civil liberties and worker rights are all aimed at making the rich richer, not building any sort of decent foundation for a middle class.

Similarly, fascists promise men a little power over women, but that dangerous promise increasingly appears false, a red flag waved to make the bulls charge. Then, when young men have rushed right in pursuit of superiority, the flag is whisked away, and nothing remains except a system where capitalists rule every aspect of our lives, none of us are free, women, queer folks, and countless others are suffering, and men are left sad, lonely, and ultimately still powerless.

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Zoë Hu, writing about Andrew Tate, the larger phenomenon of the misogynistic influencer, and modern sexism, compares the modern manosphere message to older anti-feminist ideologies:

“Patriarchy used to position women as natural caretakers and dependents; women were fitted into a domestic sphere in which they played necessary if inferior roles, bartering obedience for security. Tate’s misogyny is much simpler and much lonelier. The fraught bliss of the shared home is missing from the aspirational fixings of Tate’s influencer image. Women and property are viewed simply as financial assets. There is no marriage or romance, however false and abusive, in Tate’s world—just girlfriends who are allowed to stay with him for ‘extended periods of time.’”

It’s perfectly stated, as is much of her essay. This current version of misogyny offers even less than the versions that came before. It offers a hollow and sad transaction, demanding that men submit both to other men and to the ugly logic of capitalism. And in exchange men can now expect to receive virtually nothing, because the truth is they’re being sold weird financial schemes emblematic of late capitalism rather than any real power, love, or family.

But Hu doesn’t end there, and I’m grateful to her for closing on a note of what can be done about the increasing isolation, alienation, and radicalization into the right of young men. Near the end she says, “If the left can offer men a plausible defense against the destabilizing, isolating forces of capitalism, then men will come closer to accepting positive programs for that system’s overturn. Such a culture must go beyond new podcasts or samplings of online content. Any worthwhile defense will be rooted in personal feeling and social concourse; it will find its affirmation daily—in institutions, in sustained relationships, in what Hall called a ‘hundred shared habits.’”

In short, we need each other. Under fascism, men are promised a degree of power over women, if they’re willing to make themselves subservient to other men. And instead they get almost nothing, maybe a fleeting feeling of power, but one followed by a lasting separation, from women, from men, from communities, and from humanity. What Hu’s solution offers is connection. What a union, what neighbors, what a better world that’s not run on profit and bitterness can offer is real connection, friendships, and relationships. We can and should build the organizations, the institutions, the places for us to gather and come together instead of being isolated and alone.

All of us want these things. We all want real friends, relationships, to care and be cared for. It can be scary to admit that, and even scarier to try for these things and fail, but the idea that the answer must be either dominance over others or subservience to them is both false and unappealing. It’s a dangerously oversimplified way out of a complicated issue. And at the bottom of this answer, down at the root of this approach, is fear.

The right teaches rage, anger, a flimsy version of masculinity. A lot of that serves to cover up fear, to cover up our fear of failure or isolation instead of addressing it in any helpful way. I hope one man or boy reading this comes to see that underneath anger is often fear, and that even though you’ve been told you’re not allowed to be afraid, there’s plenty to fear in this world. It’s fair to be afraid of homelessness or of a meaningless life or of dying alone. It’s even reasonable to be afraid of love. As bell hooks writes, “Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them.”

In her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks said more than I can possibly convey here. I will just pass along one more quote, but I recommend the entire book to any man reading this. hooks says: “Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for—companionship and understanding. It is a denial of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness. Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood. It is a wall that separates you from others…”

Men, what I ask you to consider is whether or not you’re being sold a wall. Are you being sold disconnection and agony and told it’s power? Are you being sold pain and told it’s freedom? Are you being told to deny your own humanity, just to make the fear go away for a minute? Are you cutting yourself off from love because you’ve been convinced that domination is what matters? And are you denying the truth, the truth that you want human connection just as much as anyone?

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I’m here to tell you that you, me, and all of us deserve better than a life spent running from fear. We all deserve a life of happiness, connection, and love. I doubt this will reach the men who I most hope read it, but I really do hope it finds one of you. And I hope we build this world of a hundred shared habits, of a hundred places to gather and build and connect, of the relationships and closeness and comradery we all seek. That world will benefit each and every one of us, it’ll teach us love by allowing us to live it out, to practice the actions that make up love and constitute community. In that world, we all can thrive. In that world, being cut off from one another loses its appeal. In that world, we are not weapons aimed at each other, but neighbors living in solidarity day by day.

Accidentally wrote this while trying to figure things out, so I might as well publish it here. And, no, I didn’t bother to edit it, so expect fluff and rambling.

Everywhere I look, it’s becoming more and more clear that a lot of job markets are in very bad shape.

The web developer job market is in a sorry state. Software developers in general don’t seem to be doing well. Too many work for free on free or open source projects they believe in – some because they think it’ll pay off for their careers down the line, others because they just really believe in the project

The creative industries are, anecdotally, doing quite poorly. Illustrators, copywriters, voice-over artists, and translators are losing jobs to generative models. Video, TV, and cinema crews are doing badly with multiple stories going around about budgets for most projects dropping and many of them are literally working for free in the hope that it’ll somehow pay off later on or because they just really believe in the project. What distinguishes cities that are creative industry hubs – like New York, LA, or London – is that the free “I believe in this” work is subsidised by paid work elsewhere in the industry. A film-maker works for free on their indie film but shoots B-roll, music videos, and ads to pay the bills. A writer might work as a copywriter, journalist, or reporter. An illustrator does editorial and ad work to pay while working on their comic or children’s book for free. They all hope that this passion project is the one that’ll take off and pay for itself (and the next one) but, as long as there is related creative work available to pay for the practice and the gear, they’ll keep trying regardless.

The “day job” has been a fixture in the creative industries, because of how much of the work is done at pay that’s well below subsistence levels (“patient spouse” is another common form of subsidy), and this dynamic inevitably leads to burnout. There will come a point for many where you think to yourself, “none of this is working out” and you quit.

Ten-fifteen years ago I knew quite a few people who worked for UK trade publishers. Very few of them are still in the industry and those who do tend to have “adjacent” day jobs.

The creative industries have another thing in common with web dev (in fact, I’d personally categorise the web as a creative industry, but that’s a conversation for another day) and that’s the fact that its current state is largely down to poor management. US media shot itself in the foot with the switch to subscription streamers and seem unusually incapable of following through on what makes them money.

Like, Crazy Rich Asians made a ton of money in 2018. Old Hollywood would have churned out at least two sequels by now and it would have inspired at least a couple of imitator films. But if they ever do a sequel it’s now going to be at least seven or even eight years after the fact. That means that, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, they are effectively starting from scratch and the movie is unlikely to succeed.

Every Predator movie after the first has underperformed, yet they keep making more of them. Completed movies are shelved for tax credits. Entire shows are disappeared streamers and not made available anywhere to save money on residuals, which does not make any sense because the economics of Blu-Ray are still quite good even with lower overall sales and distribution than DVD. If you have a completed series or movie, with existing 4K masters, then you’re unlikely to lose money on a Blu-Ray.

You see this dysfunction throughout the creative industry. Everywhere you look you see bad products – ones made for too much money without even the limited understanding of the audience these industries used to have, with no hope of ever returning a profit – dominate film, TV, and even publishing. These industries, as a whole, are genuinely fucked up. Even the paid jobs when they happen have much lower budgets and are employing fewer people.

This dysfunction means that the “adjacent but still in the industry” jobs that used to pay for the passion projects are fewer and farther between. More and more people have to rely on unrelated day jobs (or spouses) to stay in the industry and the cold hard truth is that most of them will burn out and leave eventually.

This matters because the passion projects are how creative industries rejuvenate themselves. It’s the field’s R&D. Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez kicked off a new wave of a new kind of cinema and their first movies were no-budget passion projects.

And the blatantly commercial work, the stuff that employs people in the industry because it’s profitable, matters because that’s how you train new talent. Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, and more all got their start in either B-movies or TV.

The web is quite similar. Much of the “actual” work in the industry is done in open source, often work that’s done for free or at pay that’s well under subsistence levels. Everybody hopes their passion project will break out and become self-sustaining, but in the meantime it worked to demonstrate their skills and get them similar work that’s paid – often very well paid. Much of the web industry feels a creative industry, but one that differentiates itself in that the commercial work for the “grunts” (that is, us) in the industry pays about 5x what TV, publishing, or movie commercial work would pay, because much of it is subsidised by deranged gamblers gaming the financial industry.

Similarly, the web apps themselves have increasingly become genuinely awful. Unusable, inaccessible, and thoroughly broken on most people’s devices. Costs that are out of control. Feature-driven development that’s completely detached from customer needs – and I’m not just talking about the flood of garbage “AI” features. Pricing that is only possible because of indiscriminate VC funding and doesn’t really have any hope of returning a genuine profit.

And now, both the creative industries proper and tech companies have decided that, no, they probably don’t need that many of the “grunts” on the ground doing the actual work. They can use “AI” at a much lower cost because the output of the “AI” is not that much worse than the incredibly shitty degraded products they’ve been destroying their industries with over the past decade or so.

This changes the dynamics of these industries and those of us who aren’t in the management and executive class are no longer benefiting from the overall bargain. Tactics that made sense are now irrational.

The creative industries need to rethink their approach to streamers and standard distribution, but web dev, the industry I’m a part of, is particularly in a need of rethinking everything.

• It doesn’t make sense for us to hand over our personal projects to the industry proper. Instead it makes sense to focus on the corners of the web industry that still offer a measure of autonomy and scale the rewards with success.
• Use the web to serve customers directly. Instead of making open source components that get co-opted and integrated into garbage services by tech companies, make software directly for the customers who aren’t being served by the industry’s usual garbage.
• Making stuff for end-users who are using it in their own work and businesses makes more sense.
• You don’t have to win a million users with your web app or service, but a thousand of us with a thousand users has the same impact and, if we’re performing a valuable service for them, probably more sustainable.
• Making expensive courses and products (as in, hundreds or thousands of dollars) to help people get high-paying jobs made sense when the job market was healthy, but it’s not likely to be a sustainable product strategy when pay is stagnant and the jobs are few.
• And lower-cost courses about making said stuff – web dev for small businesses that benefits end users in a cost-effective way – also makes sense.
• Don’t get tied to a single platform for distribution or promotion. Every use of a silo should push those interested to a venue you control such as a newsletter or website.

None of this is easy, but being unemployed – discarded by your industry – is harder.

I recently woke up to learn that the Oxford English Dictionary has expanded its lexicon in the latest update to include 20 Nigerian words. One of those words is “Danfo,” the most popular–albeit unofficial–mass transit in Lagos. It’s about time. These minibusses have been around for as long as I can remember. I already knew about them before actually seeing one. Scratch that, before seeing trillions of them on my first visit to Lagos.

They originally came in the form of Volkswagen Kombi vans during the 1960s and quickly took over the city’s narrow streets and high-traffic areas. It didn’t take long for the thing to become a staple of Lagos and its de facto public transport system.

Danfo’s resilience in the face of existential threats underscores its indispensability. This resilience mirrors the unkillable nature of the T3 Volkswagen Transporters that are used as Danfo. Yep, you’re right to wonder how an approximately five-decade-old German machine maintains a tenacious grip on Nigeria’s most advanced metropolitan area.

The Transporter Came, Saw, And Conquered

The Lagos State government has never been one to be overwhelmed by anything, except when it comes to the Danfo’s stubborn, ubiquitous presence in the state.

We’re talking about a government that manages a population of around 21 million people, which grows by roughly 3,000 daily. A government that sent waves of protesting youths scurrying back to their homes by shooting them dead in the open. This microbus, painted yellow with black stripes, somehow manages to tame the powers that be.

They are everywhere and ply routes far beyond where the bigger buses make berth. It’s a colorful symbol of the persistence, tenacity, and resilience that defines the hotheaded people who live in Lagos. Before Danfo’s arrival, there were bigger buses that took forever to get a full passenger load. This matters because those buses never left their terminals until every seat was filled or something close to that, wasting commuters’ time.

So, when the smaller VW Kombi showed up with a mere 14-passenger capacity, it immediately got nicknamed “Kiakia Bus” (which means ‘Quick Bus’ in Yoruba) because it filled faster, and moved faster, too. “Kiakia” evolved into “Danfo” around the time Volkswagen introduced the T3 (third generation) during the 1980s.

Yup, Lagos is probably the only place where the Type 2 “Splitscreen” expanded from 9 passengers to a 14-passenger capacity. It’s been over six decades since the Danfo came, saw, and conquered Lagos against many odds.

Why 14 seats? The drivers rearranged and added extra seats to maximize profit, with four passengers for each seat. They even squeeze two passengers in the front passenger seat when LASTMA (Lagos State Traffic Management Agency) officials aren’t looking.

Like “Kiakia,” “Danfo” is Yoruba for “floating” or “flying.” Whoever came up with that nickname understood, like every Lagosian does, that speed, impatience, and aggressiveness are the prerequisites for being a Danfo driver.

It only has around 112 horsepower but you can hear the wailing of the engine from afar because the driver literally flattens the pedal to the metal at all times. You’d think that a reputation for stripping stark naked in public and getting violent when stopped for traffic offenses would make people think twice about trusting such drivers with their lives.

The Man Behind The Wheel

On graduating high school in 2004, Aridunnuoluwa Adeola Emmanuel moved to Lagos where he started off working as a busboy (known in the country as bus conductors). His job entailed collecting fares from passengers, assisting with boarding and disembarking, and fighting said passengers, fighting other agberos (fare collectors), and even crossing swords with his own driver when the occasion called for it.

He did this for two solid years and would have probably never graduated to “driver” had the boss not gotten ill, leaving him no choice but to muster the courage to hit the road behind the wheel of a Danfo. “I was scared at first,” he says, “but I took the courage to start driving.”

For context, Aridunnuoluwa did not need the courage to drive a van. He needed the courage to drive a Danfo – in Lagos, the sort of courage you’d need to compete in Death Race. You’d think this an exaggeration, but the condition of these buses says otherwise. Just look at them. The typical Danfo is a war rig and it seems there’s no better model for this Mad Max-worthy madness than the T3 Transporter.

“Let me explain one thing to you,” Aridunnuoluwa tells me, “Driving Danfo in Lagos is one of the craziest professions. If you see any man driving Danfo in Lagos, he can drive anywhere in the world. If you can drive a Danfo, I can assure you that you can drive any vehicle anywhere in the whole world.”

When asked what motivates Danfo drivers to strip butt-naked when confronted by traffic officials, Aridunnuoluwa says simply, “It’s really a form of protest but also not a form of protest.” If this sounds crazy, then I guess he’s vindicated.

It’s The T3 Or Nothing

It’s not like the Type 2 Volkswagen Transporter had no worthy competitors or that it was the best Lagos could do. It just so happened that the T3 had become as iconic as the black cab in London or New York’s Ford “yellow medallion” Crown Victoria. New kids are free to show up as long as they don’t mind sharing the block with the old hand. The Danfo is T3 and T3 is Danfo.

The state government and private entities introduced numerous alternatives they hoped would retire or at least help phase out the ugly, embarrassing “old hand.” Instead, the T3 remains the king of Lagos roads.

Sure, there are the Mercedes-Benz Marcopolo buses used for the state’s BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) system, complete with airconditioned cabins (in some models), dedicated lanes, and digital payment solutions. Still, the 55,000-strong BRT fleet hasn’t been able to tame the Danfo tide. Not even the ID. Buzz, which is an evolutionary model of the classic Volkswagen Kombi, can wear the Danfo’s hat.

The T3, produced from 1979 to 1992, is nearly fifty years old and offers virtually zero modern safety features. Not even a driver or passenger airbag to speak of. The interior is reduced to nothing but metal and you’d be hard-pressed to find one in new enough condition to still have any protective rubber or plastic claddings in the cabin. You see junk; I see a diehard transporter.

It’s possible to live in Lagos for a year and never meet a Danfo with the headrests or roof paddings still intact. In some cases, you could observe the driveshaft through the hole from which the gear shifter protrudes.
The ache you feel in your rear barely five minutes after boarding the vehicle is because the factory-installed chairs (in some models) have been stripped and replaced with bench-style slabs of wood lined with metal. Heck, I’ve seen a Danfo with standalone plastic chairs for seats.

All this to say that the Danfo does not dominate Lagos because it is cutting-edge or particularly competitive on its own merit but because it’s a cultural symbol deeply ingrained in Lagos consciousness. Music videos and commercial ads celebrate the Danfo over nicer, more modern alternatives for this reason.

The Heart Of An Icon

The T3 Transporter comes with a variety of engines, including the 1.6-liter / 1.9-liter / 2.0-liter air-cooled H4, 2.1-liter water-cooled inline-5, and even a 1.6-liter turbocharged diesel inline-4. These engines are easy to maintain and the lack of electronics means fewer expensive components to break and need expensive repairs.

I was lucky that Aridunnuoluwa talked to me because the others wouldn’t. Not unless there was cash involved.

Thankfully, Ari is a goldmine of information. “Danfo motor (vehicle) problems are mostly carburetor issues,” he tells me. “If you’re driving any vehicle, you’re supposed to be the first mechanic.”

Don’t I know it.

VW did offer the T3 with options like air-conditioning, radio, and cassette player. The thing is most of these buses on Lagos roads don’t have such luxuries as a radio and certainly none has air-conditioning. Nonetheless, Dnfo rules Lagos because it is the cheapest and most accessible of all the integrated public transport systems. Their discomfitingly crowded cabins offer a unique glimpse into the Nigerian way of life.

Adapt Or Face Obsolescence?

The natural order stipulates evolution or obsolescence, but there’s no such ultimatum for the Danfo because it is an icon representing something far greater than itself. Like a visual shorthand for broader concepts and movements. It’s been a while since the Danfo has weathered multiple existential storms from multiple fronts.

It is at the center of the Lagos State Government’s Bus Reform Initiative. Its aim of phasing out the outdated Volkswagen T3 Transporters in favor of more modern and regulated mass transit options like the Lagos Light Rail, BRT, and e-ticketing systems has largely failed.

Apparently, it’s not the Danfo that needs to evolve to meet modern demands, it’s the demand that needs to evolve. The novelty of rail mass transit and e-ticketing is lost on Lagosians who are highly distrustful of change and incredibly resistant to the same. More so, the people care more about omnipresence and affordability than airconditioned cabins.

Throughout history, gentrification has always been the enemy of tradition. What might seem like the incidental next volley in the government’s arsenal is the Lagos State Transport Sector Reform Law, 2018 prohibiting the use of slogans, stickers, and photos on commercial vehicles.

On the surface, this law targets advertisements on vehicles without a permit, but there’s no telling how the enforcers choose to interpret a photo or slogan on a vehicle. Aridunnuoluwa tells me there’s no such law. Which means no one is bothering Danfo drivers about it.

It may not seem like it, but a law like this, inspired by gentrification, can have a better chance of killing the Danfo over time than trying to forcefully replace them with modern models.

Why? Banning the stickers and colorful slogans with which drivers decorate their buses eats away at the very heart of what makes the Danfo culture unique. It has the power to gradually erode what the Danfo represents besides conveying people and goods from point A to point B cheaply and in familiar maximum discomfort.

The thing is, irrespective of the government’s intentional and unwitting moves to strangle the Danfo just so the city can look less embarrassing to visitors, the transition hasn’t been as smooth as the government hoped.

That’s thanks to high demand and the deep-rooted presence of the yellow bus in the city’s transport ecosystem.

It’s not that gentrification is a dirty word. What’s at stake here is a complex issue balancing modernization with the practical needs of everyone who calls Lagos home.

All photos by the author

The post Why Nigeria’s ‘Danfo’ Bus Drivers Might Be The Craziest And Most Skilled Drivers On The Planet appeared first on The Autopian.

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