Juan Carlos Muñoz Abogair
Director of the Sustainable Development Centre (CEDEUS)
Industrial Civil Engineer from UC
Master of Science in Engineering from UC
PhD and MSc from University of California at Berkeley
An important part of the appeal of cities is based on the high concentration of people able to satisfy their multiple needs in a quick and efficient way. The opportunities that emerge from these sinergies have led the planet to an explossive urbanisation process.
However, urban concentrations also produce negative externalities (those who live in cities are affected by decisions from other citizens), which have a severe impact on the efficiency of many processes inside the cities, the quality of life of its inhabitants, overconsumption of public utilities like breathable air, and the access to natural ecosystems.
Also, externalities affect poorer people to a greater extent, worsening shocking inequalities observed in many cities. They’re also hard to manage or correct because they often require restricting or charging a cost on theoretically free decisions from citizens.
Finally, as the urban environment is extremely complex, the cause-effect relation of externalities is hard to isolate from many other concurrent processes.
Urban Transport
The urban transport system is characterised by being a neutral space for these externalities. Two types of individual decisions are specially relevant when considering its potential impact on fellow citizens: I) how one goes to a destination, that is, the chosen mean of transport, the chosen route, and the chosen time; II) where activities and residencies are located in the city.
Regarding journeys, the most important local externalities are traffic jams, atmospheric pollution, noise and accidents. To this we must add greenhouse gas emissions that have a global effect. Also, to adjust journeys, it’s required to assign spaces for roads, taking them away from many other valuable activities for urban life, such as residences, services and spaces for gathering people which brings life to the city.
Traffic jams are specially worrying, because if a person chooses to take the journey in a very busy time, it doesn’t just increases the journey time in comparison to less busy times; on the way, other vehicles are affected by the decision, making multiple delays the person doing the journey doesn’t consider when making the decision.
More than just ‘being in a jam or held up’, car drivers are ‘the holdup’… even if they don’t perceive it so. The traffic jam is present especially in peak times, which concentrate a high number of journeys at some areas of the city. In this context, the most inefficient and harmful mean of transport is the automobile, that’s why it’s important to reduce its given space with the aim of discouraging its use on these times.
The space given to each mean of transport during peak times shall be more than enough for traffic during the rest of the day, and will determine the strcture of road space in the city in a permanent way. It has been empirically proved that drivers use the available road space, making jams regardless of how many lanes being given.
Also, car journeys in a busy time severely affect public transport vehicles and cargo transportation, which should have a higher priority. So it emerges the question about how to distribute the reduced road space in a fair and efficient mode.
The road space distribution indicates what means of transport are being tacitly promoted. It should be ideally promoted that journeys are done protecting not just personal interests but also collective welfare, typical of urban coexistence.
To make it happen, it’s essential to acknowledge that not all means can have equal priority on the roads. In this way, it seems necessary to discourage means whose externalities are more severe and encourage those making higher social benefits. This involves encouraging non-motorised means of transport (‘active transportation’), which doesn’t just produce less externalities but also affects people’s health positively.
It’s also important to promote collective transportation to the detriment of individual transportation. Both policies are more feasible when there are sufficiently high population densities that make viable the funding of collective transport and they also help to make journey distances not so long.
On the other side, the location of homes and journey attractors (work, school, trade, among others) greatly determine the distances that inhabitants must travel daily. When a home is located in the suburbs against being located in an inner point of an established city, it determines the journeys done by its members and those who must go to that residence.
Companies
When a company establishes its offices in a place, it determines the journeys of all those working there. Unfortunately, the people who make those decisions aren’t normally sensitive to the impact they make on the rest. So, it’s not surprising that higher-income areas tend to generate highly segregated, homogeneous neighbourhoods and attract opportunities and services to themselves.
In Santiago de Chile, in the last decades, 63% of newer m² dedicated to services (great attractors of work journeys), were located in the eastern areas of the city, which comprises only 12% of Santiago’s area and concentrates higher-income residences.
That is, the remaining 88% of the conurbation only receives the remaining 36% of new investments. Even worse, this 63% is located more and more eastwards in the city. As a consequence, the journeys of those living outside the higher-income areas become (in average) each time longer and total costs of the transportation system increase.
This phenomenon of city centre extension towards higher-income areas, is fed back because it encourages that this socio-economical group looks for more isolated places to settle down, and this forces establishing new transport infrastructure for cars in the city.
An element that eases the occurence of this process, is the fragmentation of the use of soil at a communal level (the city is divided in 34 local governments). Each local government regulates soils with the purpose of ordering and bringing attraction to the respective territory, generating incomes for the commune and benefiting its residents, with scarce awareness of the consequences for residents from other communes.
Services
In terms of transportation, in which journeys cross many communes, it’s essential to have continuity in the available infrastructure for journeys, and transport must be made of a homogenising service in terms of the offered quality in mutiple areas of the city. These phenomena, which are hugely worrying and complicate sustainable development in Santiago, are not strange to the rest of Chile and neither in the rest of Latin America.
Inequalities reach extreme levels, wealth is concentrated territorially, focalising investments in urbano furniture in wealthy zones, favouring the use of cars and perpetuating social segregation.
So it’s imperative to make incentives and regulations discouraging low-density suburban neighbourhoods, encouraging densification in high-conectivity zones, and the generation of urban subcentres. Investments should also be focalised in transport infrastructure in lower-income areas as a fairness and democratising agent in the urban space.
In this context, it’s not good for the city to have, for example, a government unit investing in expressways, another one managing buses, one looking after railway systems, one regulating taxicabs, one regulating semaphores and another one promoting bicycle lanes.
And all this, disconnected from how the urban space is ordered. Modern metropolis with the best transport systems at a global level, have learned that it’s necessary to have an entity managing the city for its investments, coordination, operations and user information. This is the case, for example, of large-size cities such as London or Singapore.
Inside them, sustainability speeches are in line with their actions and progress for a better level of services is seen, less caused externalities due to choices for means of active and public transport.
In these cities, also, there’s a metropolitan authority looking after the entire transport system, in the entire territory, and also makes appropriate incentives for a planning of the use of soil in line with the city vision being promoted. In this way, a strong governance is an essential step for sustainability in the cities.