FROM OBSCURITY TO OBJECT: TRACING THE HIDDEN ROUTES OF BEIRUT’S POPULAR TRANSPORT
TEAM MEMBERS AND ORGANIZATIONS THAT WORKED ON MAPPING BEIRUT:
JAD BAAKLINI is a communications worker and community organizer based in Seattle.
CHADI FARAJ is a telecom engineer turned social entrepreneur, bus rider, advocating for mobility justice and innovating solutions for popular mobility.
SERGEJ SCHELLEN is a graphic designer who worked on the project’s early stages and created the first paper map with the team.
SWITCHMED PROGRAM of the UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM
JAD BAAKLINI is a communications worker and community organizer based in Seattle.
CHADI FARAJ is a telecom engineer turned social entrepreneur, bus rider, advocating for mobility justice and innovating solutions for popular mobility.
SERGEJ SCHELLEN is a graphic designer who worked on the project’s early stages and created the first paper map with the team.
SWITCHMED PROGRAM of the UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM
In a city where the bus doesn’t stop unless you flag it down, where routes are handed down by word of mouth, and where infrastructure often seems to work in spite of, not because of, official planning, two researchers decided to make the invisible visible. The Busmap Project, co-founded by Jad Baaklini and Chadi Faraj, began as an attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: How does public transit actually work in Beirut?
What they found wasn’t just a network of unmarked stops and informal bus routes. It was an entire ecosystem sustained by working-class resilience, overlooked by policymakers and misrepresented in the media. Their response was to map it, document it, and in doing so, reframe it—not as a failed system, but as a living one.
“There was this moment when a politician asked at a conference, ‘Can you tell us about the existing transit system?’” Jad recalls. “And the experts said, ‘Well, there isn’t one.’ That’s when I realized they weren’t even speaking the same language…. To them, ‘system’ was something abstract,…but for me, it was real. It was buses I saw every day.”
SYSTEM, NOT CHAOS: REDRAWING THE NARRATIVE
Beirut’s bus network doesn’t announce itself. The vehicles—usually secondhand Japanese or European vans—still carry faded decals from their past lives: a school in Osaka, a German transport company, a cartoon bear. Inside, seats are often reupholstered in patterned fabric, cracked dashboards rattle over potholes, and music plays softly from cassette radios.
You board where others do. You get off when it feels right. Drivers don’t follow printed schedules: they read the street.
And the streets themselves tell their own stories. Sidewalks swell with life—vegetable stalls spilling into traffic, kids weaving between parked cars, men shouting over backgammon games outside cafés. Horns blare not just to warn but to greet, protest, or even joke. Movement in Beirut is less about order and more about negotiation—of space, of sound, and of speed.
Yet beneath this surface-level informality is a surprisingly stable system, sustained by thousands of working-class commuters: domestic workers, delivery men, construction crews, students, and elderly women heading to the market. These are Beirut’s daily riders—people for whom the bus isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.
“It’s a working-class system,” Jad explains. “If you dismiss it, you’re really dismissing the people who keep the city running.”
MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
The Busmap Project began with a simple collaboration. Jad, a media scholar interested in the social life of infrastructure, connected with Chadi Faraj, a developer who had started tracking bus routes using GPS as early as 2008. Developing software tools to make data collection and dissemination easier, Chadi and the volunteers he recruited collected data over weeks and months, steadily sharing GPS tracks online as research went along.
Chadi and Jad joined forces in 2015, not to design a new system but to prove one already existed.
They used Gaia GPS, an app meant for hikers, to trace the paths buses took through Beirut and beyond. And all the while they weren’t simply documenting––they were listening. Where do riders tend to get off? What do they call that intersection near the bakery? Why does this minibus always stop outside the faded cinema in Dekwaneh?
Their research revealed hidden truths about the routes, which had all been shaped by habit, memory, and social trust. “We weren’t mapping for the sake of data,” Jad says. “We were translating hidden knowledge.”
“Every bus line tells a story—it reflects the routines, cultures, and struggles of the communities it serves,” says Chadi Faraj of Riders’ Rights.
A MAP WITH A MISSION
Instead of building an app right away, the team made a paper map—a throwback meant to grab attention.
“It was a design object,” Jad says. “A way to change minds, not just give directions.”
Created by local designer Sergej Schellen with limited funding from the SwitchMed Program of the United Nations Environment Program, the map was part schematic, part geographic, and entirely rooted in Beirut’s reality. Unlike the clean lines of London’s Tube map, theirs was messy, colorful, and true to the city’s squiggly logic. The project team handed it out at universities, design weeks, and cultural events, using it to spark conversations—and confront biases. Suddenly, students and residents who had never taken the bus were tracing lines across unfamiliar neighborhoods.
What they found wasn’t just a network of unmarked stops and informal bus routes. It was an entire ecosystem sustained by working-class resilience, overlooked by policymakers and misrepresented in the media. Their response was to map it, document it, and in doing so, reframe it—not as a failed system, but as a living one.
“There was this moment when a politician asked at a conference, ‘Can you tell us about the existing transit system?’” Jad recalls. “And the experts said, ‘Well, there isn’t one.’ That’s when I realized they weren’t even speaking the same language…. To them, ‘system’ was something abstract,…but for me, it was real. It was buses I saw every day.”
SYSTEM, NOT CHAOS: REDRAWING THE NARRATIVE
Beirut’s bus network doesn’t announce itself. The vehicles—usually secondhand Japanese or European vans—still carry faded decals from their past lives: a school in Osaka, a German transport company, a cartoon bear. Inside, seats are often reupholstered in patterned fabric, cracked dashboards rattle over potholes, and music plays softly from cassette radios.
You board where others do. You get off when it feels right. Drivers don’t follow printed schedules: they read the street.
And the streets themselves tell their own stories. Sidewalks swell with life—vegetable stalls spilling into traffic, kids weaving between parked cars, men shouting over backgammon games outside cafés. Horns blare not just to warn but to greet, protest, or even joke. Movement in Beirut is less about order and more about negotiation—of space, of sound, and of speed.
Yet beneath this surface-level informality is a surprisingly stable system, sustained by thousands of working-class commuters: domestic workers, delivery men, construction crews, students, and elderly women heading to the market. These are Beirut’s daily riders—people for whom the bus isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.
“It’s a working-class system,” Jad explains. “If you dismiss it, you’re really dismissing the people who keep the city running.”
MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
The Busmap Project began with a simple collaboration. Jad, a media scholar interested in the social life of infrastructure, connected with Chadi Faraj, a developer who had started tracking bus routes using GPS as early as 2008. Developing software tools to make data collection and dissemination easier, Chadi and the volunteers he recruited collected data over weeks and months, steadily sharing GPS tracks online as research went along.
Chadi and Jad joined forces in 2015, not to design a new system but to prove one already existed.
They used Gaia GPS, an app meant for hikers, to trace the paths buses took through Beirut and beyond. And all the while they weren’t simply documenting––they were listening. Where do riders tend to get off? What do they call that intersection near the bakery? Why does this minibus always stop outside the faded cinema in Dekwaneh?
Their research revealed hidden truths about the routes, which had all been shaped by habit, memory, and social trust. “We weren’t mapping for the sake of data,” Jad says. “We were translating hidden knowledge.”
“Every bus line tells a story—it reflects the routines, cultures, and struggles of the communities it serves,” says Chadi Faraj of Riders’ Rights.
A MAP WITH A MISSION
Instead of building an app right away, the team made a paper map—a throwback meant to grab attention.
“It was a design object,” Jad says. “A way to change minds, not just give directions.”
Created by local designer Sergej Schellen with limited funding from the SwitchMed Program of the United Nations Environment Program, the map was part schematic, part geographic, and entirely rooted in Beirut’s reality. Unlike the clean lines of London’s Tube map, theirs was messy, colorful, and true to the city’s squiggly logic. The project team handed it out at universities, design weeks, and cultural events, using it to spark conversations—and confront biases. Suddenly, students and residents who had never taken the bus were tracing lines across unfamiliar neighborhoods.
DIGITAL TOOLS, REAL STORIES
Once the map gained visibility, the team launched busmap.me, a web platform that lets users explore the city’s routes digitally. But they were always wary of treating tech as the solution.
Alongside the app, they launched projects like Her Bus, a storytelling campaign to document women’s experiences on public transit. Many feared harassment. But the stories also told a more nuanced tale: of drivers moving men to the back so a woman could sit near the front, of strangers helping each other navigate, of older women riding comfortably each day.
“We tried not to romanticize it,” Jad explains. “But there’s a kind of protection that exists—a social choreography of safety.”
These accounts helped counter the stigma of bus travel and its dominant narrative of danger, offering a more accurate picture of how Beirut’s buses actually function day to day.
POWER, TERRITORY, AND THE POLITICS OF MOVEMENT
Beirut’s bus system didn’t emerge from a plan; it grew out of war and its aftermath. After the civil war ended in 1991, rather than investing in formal transit the government allowed informal operators to flourish. Red license plates (similar to taxi medallions) were handed out in irregular ways, often influenced by political allegiance or patronage.
What resulted was a system both fragmented and functional, in which some operators carved out specific routes and others competed for passengers on overlapping paths. As competition grew, bus drivers found creative ways to protect their routes––and their livelihoods. In rare moments, the system produced government cooperation and bottom-up order.
“We assumed it came from an urban planner,” Jad says. “But it was the drivers. That’s how the city works—through negotiation.”
Once the map gained visibility, the team launched busmap.me, a web platform that lets users explore the city’s routes digitally. But they were always wary of treating tech as the solution.
Alongside the app, they launched projects like Her Bus, a storytelling campaign to document women’s experiences on public transit. Many feared harassment. But the stories also told a more nuanced tale: of drivers moving men to the back so a woman could sit near the front, of strangers helping each other navigate, of older women riding comfortably each day.
“We tried not to romanticize it,” Jad explains. “But there’s a kind of protection that exists—a social choreography of safety.”
These accounts helped counter the stigma of bus travel and its dominant narrative of danger, offering a more accurate picture of how Beirut’s buses actually function day to day.
POWER, TERRITORY, AND THE POLITICS OF MOVEMENT
Beirut’s bus system didn’t emerge from a plan; it grew out of war and its aftermath. After the civil war ended in 1991, rather than investing in formal transit the government allowed informal operators to flourish. Red license plates (similar to taxi medallions) were handed out in irregular ways, often influenced by political allegiance or patronage.
What resulted was a system both fragmented and functional, in which some operators carved out specific routes and others competed for passengers on overlapping paths. As competition grew, bus drivers found creative ways to protect their routes––and their livelihoods. In rare moments, the system produced government cooperation and bottom-up order.
“We assumed it came from an urban planner,” Jad says. “But it was the drivers. That’s how the city works—through negotiation.”
In Dawra, a busy transit hub in Beirut, drivers along a shared highway started losing passengers to cutthroat competitors. At first, each driver tried to handle the situation themselves, but when that wasn’t enough, the affected drivers took collective action. They approached the nearby municipality of Burj Hammoud, asking for help to bring some order to the chaos.
Surprisingly, the municipality responded, setting up a small kiosk that functioned like an informal bus station and introducing a queuing system to organize departures. This made it easier for drivers to take turns fairly. While modest, these changes made a real difference: passengers experienced a smoother, more predictable ride, and drivers saw their business stabilize.
It’s a powerful example of how even simple, local interventions—driven by the people most affected—can improve public transit in meaningful ways.
A LASTING LEGACY
In 2018, the Busmap Project’s feature at Beirut Design Week marked their transition from scrappy researchers to recognized advocates.
“That felt like a proud moment,” Jad remembers. “People were asking questions—not about whether the system existed, but how to make it better.”
The team’s work continued through the NGO Riders’ Rights, which they founded to expand advocacy beyond mapping. Today, Chadi Faraj remains in Beirut, carrying the work forward amid Lebanon’s ongoing economic and political crises—and, he says, into a new phase of the struggle for mobility justice.
“Now, as the transport landscape shifts again—with new operators and deeper inequalities—we’re advocating not just for buses, but for fairness,” Chadi says. “Our vision is a living map, powered by riders, that adapts with the system and pushes it toward justice.”
Surprisingly, the municipality responded, setting up a small kiosk that functioned like an informal bus station and introducing a queuing system to organize departures. This made it easier for drivers to take turns fairly. While modest, these changes made a real difference: passengers experienced a smoother, more predictable ride, and drivers saw their business stabilize.
It’s a powerful example of how even simple, local interventions—driven by the people most affected—can improve public transit in meaningful ways.
A LASTING LEGACY
In 2018, the Busmap Project’s feature at Beirut Design Week marked their transition from scrappy researchers to recognized advocates.
“That felt like a proud moment,” Jad remembers. “People were asking questions—not about whether the system existed, but how to make it better.”
The team’s work continued through the NGO Riders’ Rights, which they founded to expand advocacy beyond mapping. Today, Chadi Faraj remains in Beirut, carrying the work forward amid Lebanon’s ongoing economic and political crises—and, he says, into a new phase of the struggle for mobility justice.
“Now, as the transport landscape shifts again—with new operators and deeper inequalities—we’re advocating not just for buses, but for fairness,” Chadi says. “Our vision is a living map, powered by riders, that adapts with the system and pushes it toward justice.”