Transport workers have largely been placed outside the radar of critical urban studies, although they are at the core of urban mobility. By adopting a co-production perspective and asking ‘who owns the motor tricycle taxis in Wa, Ghana’, this paper explores owner-operator relationships in the tricycle taxi industry. We posit that rather than being actuated by workers in the informal economy, the industry is co-produced by practices of state-sanctioned institutions, street-level bureaucrats and actors linked to power and wealth. The varied actor constellations and resultant contractual arrangements greatly shape how motor tricycle taxis operate; their mobility offers and regulatory challenges in Ghana. Therefore, we propose an urban research agenda that mainstreams urban transport workers into critical urban studies and call for an open discourse to interrogate the problematisation of motor tricycle taxis in urban transport policy and planning in sub-Saharan African cities. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.