A Metrobus stop on 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires, with the famous Obelisk in the background. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 6 2014 (IPS)

Sustainable transport grew in the Latin American cities of Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro in 2013.

The left-wing government of the Mexican capital inaugurated the fifth Metrobús bus rapid transit (BRT) system route and extended the Ecobici Individual Transport System.

It also expanded the Ecoparq parking meter system – a new parking management scheme – into new areas on the west side of the city and opened up a new pedestrian-only street in the old city.

In the Argentine capital, meanwhile, the third Metrobús line began to operate with great success on Avenida 9 de Julio, and the government expanded its “Buenos Aires, mejor en bici” (Buenos Aires, Better by Bike) programme.

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the centre-right city government forged ahead with the construction of the Transcarioca and Transbrasil BRT corridors, while the second stage of the Transoeste BRT project got underway.

The network of bicycle paths was also enlarged, as part of the infrastructure planned for the FIFA World Cup, to be held in Brazil from Jun. 12 to Jul. 13, and the 2016 Olympic summer games in Rio de Janeiro.

In Mexico City, “there have been interesting projects, but they haven’t been carried out at the desired speed,” Bernardo Baranda, Latin America director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS.

He called for more initiatives and said they should be more rapidly implemented, aimed at “a further reduction of the use of automobiles” in greater Mexico City, home to more than 20 million people.

As part of that objective, he said it was important to expand Ecobici, which includes exclusive and non-exclusive bike lanes as well as a bike-share system.

What is happening in greater Rio de Janeiro, population 11.7 million, “is very exciting,” he said. “A great deal has been invested in infrastructure. Bicycle use has expanded. The centre has great potential for better transport conditions.”

The ITDP Latin America director said that in greater Buenos Aires, home to some 13 million people, “the use of public bicycles has been fomented, along with the idea of turning several streets in the microcenter into pedestrian-only.”

Roberto Remes, an independent Mexican expert in public policies on the environment and transportation, also pointed to interesting developments in the three cities.

He explained to IPS that in Buenos Aires, right-wing Mayor Mauricio Macri “is trying to build an alternative system to the subway,” which turned 100 years old in December.

Meanwhile, “in Mexico we see mainly plans. Apparently we’ll do ok, we’ll have an integrated system with policies focused on mobility and a person-oriented, rather than car-oriented, perspective.”

With respect to Rio de Janeiro, he said “they want their prepaid public fare cards and their institutional image to be the same across the entire country – something that not many countries have achieved.”

The three cities face similar challenges, such as heavy dependence on private vehicles, the proliferation of parking garage buildings, and virtually no progress on road safety, except in the case of Buenos Aires.

In addition, there have been social protests against the infrastructure work accompanying the development of sustainable, multimodal transportation systems.

Baranda said “the bicycle must be better integrated with mass transit, and more integrated transport is needed in order to make it easier to get around.”

On Jan. 15, the ITDP and eight other organisations will grant the Sustainable Transport Award in Washington, DC. This year’s nominees include Buenos Aires, Lanzhou, China and Suwon, South Korea. Mexico City won the award in 2013.

The prize, granted since 2005 to cities of more than 500,000 people, awards accomplishments such as improving public transportation and public spaces, reducing transport-related air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and improving safety and access for cyclists and pedestrians.

This year, the Mexico City government will build another Metrobús line and will expand segregated and non-segregated bike paths.

For its part, the ITDP will focus on reducing the number of parking garages, and drew up a study on the viability of a Metrobús line on the central Avenida Reforma.

For the 2013-2016 period, the Rio de Janeiro city administration plans to build 150 km of bike paths, as well as bicycle parking stations, to reach a total network of 450 km by 2016.

Buenos Aires projects the creation of another four Metrobús routes for 2014-2015.

The December report on “Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts of BRT Systems” stresses the benefits of bus rapid transit in Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Istanbul, Turkey.

The report was produced by EMBARQ, the sustainable urban transport and planning programme of the World Resources Institute (WRI).

The study shows that BRT systems have led to travel time savings, a reduction in vehicle operating costs, improvements in health due to reduced pollution, and improved road safety.

But it also identifies challenges such as declining quality of service, the exclusion of the poorest residents from the system, limited integration with other transport systems, and competition with subways.

Remes warned that it was not enough to focus transport strategies on merely establishing BRT systems without addressing other possibilities, such as urban trains.

“The existing models of financing, management and planning only allow for the expansion of these systems. If we create BRT corridors, we can cover the cities in a decade, but there is still a problem: transfers and switches from one system to another. There’s something that’s not working in the long-term vision,” he said.

In the 1970s, nations like Japan, South Korea or Singapore began to build railway networks to foment a mix of transport, employment, financing and economic development in big cities.

In Latin America, “we are a millennium behind,” Remes lamented.

Bogotá is famous for its vast network of bike lanes. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Dec 17 2013 (IPS)

“I ride 43 km a day and I love it,” said Carlos Cantor in Bogotá, Colombia. “Five years ago I switched my car for a bike,” explained Tomás Fuenzalida from Santiago, Chile.

They are both part of the burgeoning growth of cycling as a transport solution in Latin America.

But in the second-most urbanised region in the world, public sentiment towards bicycles is mixed, with some seeing them as a symbol of low socioeconomic status, says the “Biciciudades 2013” study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) with regard to the expansion of this sustainable means of transport in large and medium-sized cities in the region.

The report, based on surveys and commissioned by the IDB’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative, found that between 0.4 and 10 percent of the population in the region use a bicycle as their main means of transportation.

Among the cities studied, Cochabamba in Bolivia heads the list, with 10 percent of the population depending on the bicycle. It is followed by La Paz, Bolivia, and Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, with five percent. All of these are intermediate cities with populations between 100,000 and two million people.

Among the big cities, in Santiago and Mexico City, three percent of the population use bicycles as their main means of transport, followed by Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, and Bogotá, with two percent.

Bogotá is known as a world leader in bike paths, with 376 km of “ciclorutas” or dedicated lanes – one of the most extensive networks in the world – and 120 km of recreational paths. In addition, car traffic is cut on some streets on Sundays and holidays.

Cantor, a 58-year-old communications specialist, took a break from his daily ride to tell Tierramérica about his experience cycling in the city. “You can go fast, because there’s no traffic; on some stretches I even enjoy the greenery and the quiet,” he said. “There’s a lot of solidarity, and you make friends.”

The Secretariat of Mobility of the Capital District estimates that in Bogotá, a city of around eight million people, local residents make about 450,000 bike trips a day. The largest group of bicycle users are manual labourers and factory workers, followed by students from lower-income families.

The recreational bike paths date back to 1974 and are used by an average of one million people every Sunday.

“I love the [recreational] bike paths, I use them every Sunday,” law student Carolina Mejía told Tierramérica. “But I don’t use the ciclorutas, because many of them havent’ been completed yet, and there are stretches that you have to share with cars and buses, and that scares me. Also, it’s not safe.”

Cantor agreed that there are safety concerns: “Every day bicycles are stolen, and there’s a brisk trade in stolen bicycles. In a question of seconds they change the colour with a spray can and your bike disappears.” But he said “people learn to use less pretentious bikes, and they put marks on them so it’s harder to sell them underground.”

Fuenzalida, 44, swapped his car for a bike in the Chilean capital “for my health,” because “you get exercise without paying a single peso in the gym” and because “it is much nicer to ride a bike than to take the subway, for example.”

The public relations specialist not only pedals to work, but also uses the bike to take his kids to school, go to meetings, or visit family members.

For people like him, the Santiago city government is implementing a “master plan” to extend bike lanes to a total of 933 km. The city currently has 215 km of bike lanes, while there are 130 km of paths in adjacent rural municipalities.

Greater Santiago is home to over five million people.

“This is one of the keys to increasing the use of bicycles, and for the city and residents of Santiago to see the benefits in the easing of traffic congestion and for health and the environment,” the Chilean government’s spokesperson Cecilia Pérez told Tierramérica.

The mayor of the Santiago metropolitan area, Juan Antonio Peribonio, told Tierramérica that the plan would be ready in 2022 and that lanes were being built to connect the existing paths. To that will be added a public system to lend out bicycles, in order to promote cycling.

But not everything is positive for cyclists. “Sometimes pedestrians, taxi drivers or car drivers insult me, they call me stupid,” said Laurie Fachaux, a 28-year-old French journalist who has lived in Chile for a few months. “They should get used to the fact that I have a right to be on the streets just like they do.”

Antonia Larraín, 37, believes that part of the problem is the lack of regulations protecting cyclists. “If an accident happens, there is total impunity,” said the psychologist, who pedals 13 km a day to and from work.

Enrique Rojas, 50, who has driven a taxi for 30 years in Santiago, reflected the other side of the coin. “Cyclists are careless, they wind in and out of the cars and don’t respect traffic signals; I have often almost hit one of them because they didn’t stop for a red light or because they were riding at night without any light,” he commented to Tierramérica.

“Cyclists should also have to take out a permit, and bicycles should have licence plates. They shouldn’t just be able to get on their bikes and not worry about anything – they leave their safety in the hands of others,” he complained.

But bicycle use is growing nonetheless, like in greater Mexico City, which has a population of around 20 million.

“It has been a relatively short process,” said Xavier Treviño, director of the Mexican office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). “The greatest success has been turning cycling into an alternative means of transport, and the main strength has been promotion of cycling,” he told Tierramérica.

The most visible symbol of cycling in the Mexican capital is the Ecobici Individual Transportation System, which since its launch in 2010 has drawn 87,000 users of 4,000 bicycles at 275 stations along 22 km of paths. Users register and pay 31 dollars a year.

Mexico City also has 90 km of separated and non-separated bike lanes. “Systems like Ecobici provide incentives for continued growth. It’s positive inertia. But infrastructure is lacking. All main roads should have infrastructure for bicycles,” Treviño said.

According to Ecociudades 2013, nearly all of the 18 intermediate and six large cities studied have bike lanes, with the exception of Asunción, Paraguay and Manizales, Colombia.

But only Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Asunción, La Paz and Montevideo – the capital of Uruguay – have regulations for urban cycling, as Rojas, the taxi driver, was calling for.

With reporting by Helda Martínez (Bogotá), Emilio Godoy (Mexico City) and Marianela Jarroud (Santiago).

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Mass transit is still impossible in the narrow streets of Rio de Janeiro’s hillside favelas. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 25 2013 (IPS)

The TransBrasil bus rapid transit system, which will connect poor suburbs with the centre of Rio de Janeiro, will be the high-speed bus corridor that serves the largest number of commuters in the world.

The massive infrastructure works in Rio de Janeiro in preparation for mega-events like the 2016 Olympic Games opened a window for experts to propose to the authorities a baptism of fire: learn about sustainable urban mobility – or better yet, transit-oriented development.

Another gap was opened up by the mass protests that broke out in June in Rio and other cities, initially triggered by the problems plaguing mass transit in Brazil’s major cities.

Images of bumper-to-bumper traffic and queues hundreds of metres long of people waiting for the subway made their way around the world during Pope Francis’ visit to Rio in July.

Although transit-oriented development (TOD) may seem like a new concept, it is not, Robert Cervero, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Berkeley, told Tierrámerica.*

“The idea is how do we take advantage of these massive and expensive public investments in BRT [bus rapid transit] and in rail to make our communities more sustainable, with cleaner air, making cities more liveable, and bringing public health benefits,” he said. “In America we have a huge obesity epidemic and it is partly because we drive too much and walk too little.”

TOD refers to a mixed-use residential and commercial area designed to maximise access to public transport, often including features to encourage the use of mass transit.

The TransBrasil dedicated bus corridor will be 32 km long and will carry an estimated 820,000 commuters a day. The budget is 570 million dollars, and the project, still in the bidding process, is scheduled to take 36 weeks.

“We have to adapt and adjust to each city, each culture,” Cervero said.

“The idea of TOD is to really focus on the [transformational] capacity of bus rapid transit corridors, subway and metros. And the stations become the focal point for organising redevelopment, mixing land uses: housing, jobs, restaurants,” the expert said.

“You want people to walk and bike. You try to make socially engaging places. The best TOD is more than places to get on and off trains and buses. There are civic spaces, places where people congregate, open markets, safe and comfortable places.”

Organising two global events like the 2014 FIFA World Cup or the 2016 Olympics “is a once in a generation opportunity…a huge opportunity that you don’t want to squander,” Cervero said.

But the most important thing is “what happens afterwards,” he stressed. “Hopefully after the sporting events are over, the mass public investments in infrastructure…will serve neighbourhoods, communities and people. That requires planning. It really takes leadership because we are talking about multiple jurisdictional contexts.”

Cervero was in Brazil to attend the “we are the cities” seminar organised Sept. 18 by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) to urge local authorities and political leaders to rethink the potential of TransBrasil .

According to the head of ITDP Brazil, Clarisse Linke, this “urban redesign” has not been done in Rio, where it is still a distant idea.

The number of vehicles per capita in Rio has soared over the last decade, to 2.5 million today, and is estimated to rise to three million by 2015. Rio de Janeiro proper has a population of 6.4 million.

On average, people in this city spend an hour and a half commuting every day. But many spend much more time – up to four to six hours a day.

“The big question is how to integrate urban planning with transportation, to make a more equitable and liveable city,” Linke told Tierramérica.

TransBrasil will follow a key route linking the suburbs with the centre: Av. Brasil, a major thoroughfare that runs through dozens of poor neighbourhoods.

“Today that avenue is a scar across a run-down part of the city,” Linke said. “The BRT corridor can revitalise all of the neighbourhoods near the stations.”

BRT, now used in dozens of cities across the globe, was first invented in Brazil. It was pioneered in the southern city of Curitiba in 1974 and is now an international model for sustainable transport.

Traffic in Rio is chaotic, Maria Luiza Korenchendler, an official with the Rio municipal urban planning secretariat, acknowledged. But once the TransBrasil is completed, the time it takes to commute from the suburbs to the city centre will be reduced by 40 percent, she said.

“The big urban transformation will be to create an area of special urban planning interest around Av. Brasil,” she told Tierramérica.

Cervero said: “I’ve been to Brazil many times. Brazil is a very rapidly industrialising and modernising country where a lot of people are buying cars.

“You could also avoid the problems we’ve had in North America [where we have] really extremely automobile-dependent cities.”

BRT has the advantage of cutting commuting time, discouraging the use of cars, and making it possible to transport large numbers of people at very low cost, he said.

“Our experience shows that it doesn’t take a lot of money,” he said. “You need a plan to orchestrate the development and public commitments in order for private investors to follow.

“There is a real chance in Brazil to create and revitalise industrial districts. It takes leadership and it takes time. It is a very bottom- up participatory process, you’ve got to engage local residents and they have to have a sense of ownership in creating this.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Bus rapid transit lanes like this one in the west of Rio de Janeiro are relatively low cost and easy to implement. Credit: ITDP/Leonardo Miguel Silva Martins

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

Bus lanes, cycle paths and pedestrian walkways are viable solutions to the transport collapse in Brazil’s big cities. But economic interests, red tape and the lack of strategies for an integrated system are delaying a process that the protests raging across the country for the last few weeks have made an urgent issue.

“Traffic is terrible in Rio de Janeiro; it’s much faster to use my bike, and I get exercise at the same time,” film producer Miriam Gerber, who cycles to and from work, to go shopping or just to go for rides, told IPS.

But traffic and the scarcity of bike paths can often transform a pleasant ride into a hellish experience.

“The traffic is dreadful. Cars drive very close together and they don’t slow down when they see you. A lot of people are hit by cars. Since our bodies are our bumpers, we haven’t got a chance,” said Gerber.

The urban transport policy in this country of over 198 million people has prioritised car use since the 1960s, building more and more freeways and limiting the options for pedestrians and cyclists.

Recent tax exemptions to stimulate car sales had a positive effect on economic growth, income and employment.

But at the same time, they created the spectre of breakneck growth in the national vehicle fleet.

The number of automobiles in Brazil’s 12 largest cities increased by 890,000 a year between 2001 and 2011, according to the Observatório das Metrópoles, a think tank. Whereas Brazil’s population grew by 11 percent in that decade, annual registration of new vehicles rose by 120 percent, says a report by The Economist, a British newspaper.

“In a collapse like this one, cities lose out heavily in economic, productive, environmental and social terms,” Clarisse Linke, the head of the Brazil office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), which works for sustainable and equitable transport worldwide, told IPS.

“Transport is a key question in making cities socially fair and equitable. This whole wave of demonstrations began precisely because of the debate about transport and social justice. Our country is growing economically, but our cities are increasingly unjust,” she said.

Leftwing Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff announced in 2012 that she would prioritise public transport in big cities, with joint investment with state and municipal governments amounting to 16 billion dollars. The plan would include 600 kilometres of roads, 200 kilometres of railway tracks, 381 terminals and the purchase of light rail carriages.

In the same year a law on urban mobility was passed, setting out guidelines for sustainability and the democratisation of public spaces. The law prioritises collective transport and establishes that all cities of over 20,000 people must draw up transport plans covering up to 2015. However, few cities have begun to get organised.

“This problem is deeply rooted in Brazil, as well as in other Latin American countries: there is corruption, bureaucratic machinery that slows things down, and lack of clarity or vision about the role of transportation in the future of these cities,” Linke said.

Orlando dos Santos Júnior, an expert on urban planning at the Observatório das Metrópoles, added further reasons in an interview with IPS.

For instance, in Rio de Janeiro, “big systems are being built (in the city proper) that are not integrated with outlying areas. It is obvious there are going to be negative effects, because it is a misguided and irrational plan that wastes public money, reflecting the subordination of the municipal government to powerful economic interests.”

ITDP supports investment in bus rapid transit (BRT) lanes, which are relatively low cost and have a short lead time.

The southern city of Curitiba pioneered BRT systems, combining high-quality stations, overland bus transport and real- time information systems with dedicated lanes for buses and high-capacity vehicles. The buses are clean and comfortable, and passengers pay their fare before embarking, reducing the wait time for departures from stops, Linke said.

A score of Brazilian cities have plans to build BRT systems. São Paulo has its Expresso Tiradentes, the southern city of Belo Horizonte is building two lanes, and Rio de Janeiro inaugurated one in 2012 and has three more under construction.

However, the needs of the populace were not met, Santos criticised. “What we are seeing is that the large cities are preparing to welcome the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games,” he said.

ITDP also supports the need for integrating large transport systems like subways or trains with BRT lanes and the promotion of cycling and walking.

Ze Lobo, the head of Transporte Ativo, a local NGO, said bicycles are an immediate solution for transport needs up to distances of five to seven kilometres.

“The more we use them, the quicker the authorities will have to create infrastructure for bicycles,” he told IPS.

Lobo said “the big problem is still the lack of understanding among city engineering departments and other authorities of the importance of bicycles.” In addition to cycle paths, investment is needed on access routes and parking spaces for cycles in train stations.

But the problem is not just transport; it extends to urban planning as well. “People should live and work in the same place, to avoid unnecessary commuting. Increasing multiple use planning permission could bring about a 30 percent decline in average kilometres of car travel per person per day,” said Linke.

Expanding the railway systems is another challenge. According to an industry association report on metropolitan railways, passenger numbers are growing faster than facilities on the network, causing serious overcrowding for the population.

Trains and subways transported nine million passengers a day in 2012, 3.8 percent more than in 2011. This year passenger numbers are forecast to rise by 10 percent, indicating a need for investment over and above existing plans.

In parallel, according to both Linke and Lobo, car use must be actively discouraged, for instance by limiting parking places or restricting vehicle traffic at peak hours.

Otherwise, traffic safety will no longer be a problem for cyclists, Lobo joked. “If nothing is done, in a few years it will be absolutely safe to pedal between cars that are completely stationary, in total gridlock.”

Ecobici, the government bike share system launched in 2010, has nearly 50,000 users in Mexico City. Credit: EMBARQ Brasil/CC-BY-2.0

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

Latin America’s big cities should cooperate with each other in order to overcome shared challenges in transport issues, such as sustainability and a more human-centered approach to urban development, experts say.

“Challenges in the cities are very similar. Car use was favoured and the cities’ growth suffered from planning deficiencies, and now they have to make the public transport sector a priority,” Bernardo Baranda, Latin America regional director for the U.S. Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS.

“Cooperation is an interesting approach, because a lot can be learned from what other cities are doing. Nowadays projects are being taken up to give priority to public transportation, improving quality and giving users alternatives so that they leave their cars at home,” he said.

On Tuesday Jan. 15, ITDP and eight other international organisations presented the 2013 Sustainable Transport Award to the Mexico City Federal District, the country’s capital, which was represented by the city’s heads of Transport and Highways and of Environment, Rufino León and Tania Müller, respectively.

Nine million people live in the Federal District, and 20.4 million in the Mexico City metropolitan area, which spills over into part of the adjacent state of Mexico, one of the 31 states in the country. The size of its population puts Mexico City in third place among global megacities, after Tokyo and Delhi, according to the United Nations.

The other four finalists for the award were the cities of Rosario, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Bremen, Germany; and Kiev, Ukraine. They had been selected from among nine candidates in eight countries.

ITDP and the Centre for Sustainable Transport-EMBARQ nominated Mexico City in August for adding an extra route to the Metro Collective Transport System, extending the public Ecobici bike share programme, and installing parking metres in some neighbourhoods.

In 2012 the cities of San Francisco, California in the United States and Medellín, Colombia shared the award, while in 2011 the winner was Guangzhou, China and in 2010, Ahmedabad, India.

Consultant Roberto Remes told IPS that the award for sustainable transport is a special opportunity for Latin American cities – nominated or not – to get together to share their experiences and discuss possible solutions.

“Best practices are an incentive, but one must understand that suppliers of technology carry out intense lobbying that is not always in line with best practices. This leads to governments looking for ways of using the technology, instead of looking for a solution for a specific problem, which is a flawed approach,” he said.

“It would be better for governments to act according to state-of-the-art knowledge and best practices,” Remes said.

In April 2012, Metrobus Line 4, covering 28 kilometres in the Mexican capital, came into operation, expanding the bus rapid transit (BRT) system that uses dedicated lanes, while Metrobus Line 12, covering 24 kilometres, opened in October 2012.

Ecobici, the bike share system launched in 2010 by the metropolitan government, has nearly 50,000 users who have made close to five million trips. The scheme has 264 bike stations and 3,670 bicycles in the centre and west of the capital.

Finally, the Ecoparq system of parking metres has been in operation since January 2012 in two neighbourhoods in the west of the capital, and is about to expand into other areas.

These measures taken by the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which has governed the Federal District since 1997, seek to reduce the use of private vehicles that leads to chaotic urban transport, and create environmental benefits such as pollution reduction.

In the metropolitan area of the Valley of Mexico, where the Federal District and several municipalities of the adjacent state of Mexico are located, citizens make 49 million journeys daily, 53 percent of them on public transport and 17 percent in private vehicles, according to the Centre for Sustainable Transport-EMBARQ.

The creation of BRT-type systems in the region’s megacities has shown a marked increase over the last decade, to the point that they now exist in at least 17 cities. The same has happened with public bicycle share programmes.

The award is “a recognition and a call for continuity, to make (the programmes) more aggressive in the coming years, in order to give citizens better transport options,” Baranda said.

“There is still a great deal to be done to integrate different modes of transport, to make it easier for users to change from one mode to another,” said the ITDP regional director, who is currently negotiating a collaboration agreement with the capital city government.

In 2009, transportation expert Carlos Pardo wrote a report titled “Los cambios en los sistemas integrados de transporte masivo en las principales ciudades de América Latina” (Changes in integrated mass transport systems in the major cities of Latin America) for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

In it he identified challenges in this field among cities in the region, including integration and coherence with other modes of public transport, with non-motorised transport, with urban policies and with public and private investments in public transport, and the corresponding priorities.

The study also discusses the need for synchronising project execution timing and politically determined timing; and the importance of feasibility studies and the analysis of alternatives, in order to carry out projects that are successful in the medium to long term.

In 2012, Rio de Janeiro, which has 11.8 million people and is the Brazilian city with the second highest population after São Paulo, opened its first BRT corridor, called TransOeste. It also expanded the shared bicycle programme it launched in 2011, and started a project for improving public spaces.

The Argentine city of Rosario, which has nearly 1.2 million people, has concentrated on improving transport, the bicycle programme and public spaces.

In October, ITDP presented a plan titled “Perspectivas de crecimiento de la red de Metrobús y transporte integrado del Distrito Federal a 2018” (Prospects for growth in the Metrobus network and integrated transport in the Federal District to 2018) which proposes annual growth in the system of between 25 and 30 kilometres and the addition of 10 new routes by 2018, benefiting some two million additional passengers.

This year, the Mexico City government intends to extend the Metrobus and Ecobici systems, strengthening multimodal integration.

“We have to make the leap to an integrated transport system. The modality and the route do not matter as much as the user having access to a system of smooth transfers, with discounted fares. The connectivity of all the systems is very important,” said Remes.

(END)