Mobility right, modal splits and space of urban flows in Argentina?s metropolitan cities

JIMENA DMUCHOWSKY; ALBERTO ARECO; MAXIMILIANO VELÁZQUEZ

CDMX

Congreso; T2M Mexico City 2016 Conference; 2016

International Association for the History of TRANSPORT, TRAFFIC & MOBILITY

With a level of urbanization that exceeds 90%, Argentina is one of the most urbanized countries in the world. The basic pattern of Latin American urban expansion since the mid-twentieth century is low-density urban sprawl. This pattern of metropolitan growth poses serious challenges to public transport systems, especially in ensuring geographical coverage and social accessibility to the bus and train services. Urban transport has as its central feature being a necessary vehicle for access to the city and to the basic needs of the population, such as access to work, education, health, shopping and recreation. This "mobility right", as part of the necessary "right to the city" contributes to improving the quality of life. Are the Argentine metropolitan cities and their mobility facilities good drivers for sustainable development and social equity?Metropolitan regions are units whose size and scale far exceed the municipal administrative boundaries. It depicts increasingly sophisticated flows and modal split frictions throughout its historical growth, and it simultaneously presents challenges for the construction of new relations of urban governance, in particular with regard to the mobility and transport policies.The transport system of all these cities is, therefore, the outcome of different policies implemented at different historical moments in order to solve the pressing problems that were posed. The initial question seeks to reflect on the relationship between urban mobility and territorial specificity in the major agglomerations of the country. The assumption is that higher concentration of population, economic, social and cultural activities develops more complex transport systems, which are diversified especially in the supply of urban public transport. Different rhythms, flows and cultural uses of the peak hours of the working days show different modal splits in the main cities and in their suburbs. The working hypotheses raised are: a) the growth and planning of the metropolitan areas would follow the pattern of Buenos Aires, because of its hegemonic presence, leading to a prevalence of such pattern of growth in the other Regions; b) the increased travel, relative to the extent of the population and territory, shows a higher rate of trips and travelers; and c) private transport is prevalent in large cities, in relation to public transport.The methodological strategy for this stage of the inquiry is the analysis of urban mobility databases of surveys conducted in the main cities of Argentina by the Urban Transportation Project for Metropolitan Areas (PTUMA), which recently produced the first data on urban mobility after an important period of statistical vacuum. We carried out a comparative study of the cities of Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Rosario, Santa Fe, Mendoza, Tucumán, Salta, Paraná, Posadas, Resistencia, Neuquén, Corrientes, Cipolletti; the major metropolitan areas of Argentina, which account for 52% of the total population.