Where does demand for public transport stand?

GUTIERREZ, ANDREA INES

Competition and Ownership in Land Passanger Transport

Elsevier Ltd.

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2005; p. 455 - 478

Changes that have taken place in economics and society over the last twenty years have happened mainly in big cities, and these changes inevitably affect mobility within them. A commonplace phenomena that shows up in specialised literature in this field is the decreasing demand for passenger public bus transport services in big cities, both in rich and poor countries. This phenomena also occurs in Buenos Aires[1], where the number of bus passengers is falling steadily for the first time, although it is the most important public transport network in the city. This issue is the most outstanding fact in a scenario notorious for its low capacity to pronounce, implement and evaluate public policies for this trade.   While the public transport market shrinks, the population in big cities does not and nor does its need for mobility. Moreover, in increasingly poor and socially unequal cities, such as Buenos Aires, demand for public transport remains steady and increasing due to the high ownership and maintenance costs of cars.   Speaking from a strictly economic point of view, the shrinkage of the public bus transport market brings up a number of queries: Where does demand for public transport stand? Is this demand enough to sustain commercial management of the service? Under what conditions?   In broader terms, heading towards a social and territorial point of analysis, other queries come up. For public bus transport, born with the industrial city as a massive and spinal service, the question arises: Is it still valid in the post-industrial city? If public bus transport is still valid despite its loss in the struggle against the automobile, the following question comes up: Has the conventional management model of public bus transport become obsolete?   This work aims to analyse the above-mentioned queries, taking as a starting point that the context of analysis from which the proposed questions and answers regarding public bus transport in the big cities of globalization is obsolete.   This paper, which has taken the case of Buenos Aires as a subject matter based on the public bus transport, is basically theoretical. Its conceptual context combines input from diverse areas, especially geography, economics and urban sociology. [1] The paper gives the name Buenos Aires to the metropolitan region that include the city of Buenos Aires and forty three counties in an area of 19,680 square kilometres and a population of about 13.7 million (Map 1).