Buenos Aires: Reflection of Latin American Transportation

As in other large cities of the region, the capital of Argentina has suffered accelerated changes in past decades, which have negatively affected the lives of its citizens. The population's saturation affects the levels of poverty, social exclusion, as well as the chronic congestion of the roads, high accident rates, and degradation of the environment.        

Close to 13,267,000 people (33 percent of the total population) live in the metropolitan area. The city concentrates almost half of the country's manufacturing activities, commercial establishments, services, and financial services. A little over 3.5 million inhabitants of the Greater Buenos Aires Area enter the capital on a daily basis, leading to high congestion in the transportation system, which is made up of private vehicles, a suburban train, the metro, and a tram. 

In its Buenos Aires chapter, the documentDesarrollo Urbano y Movildad en America Latina(Urban Development and Mobility in Latin America) concludes that currently, the public transportation systems (with few exceptions) are unable to service the increasing demand, and evidence cyclical crisis linked to the incompatibility between costs and rates, the deficiencies in the operational management, and difficulties to obtain effective priority in circulation. 

The situation becomes more serious due to the lack of a quality public transportation system resulting in the promotion of the use of individual transportation, and an increase in the levels of congestion and pollution. 

To ensure a greater efficiency in this mobility system, CAF's study proposes the creation of a metropolitan authority that regulates, controls, and plans urban transportation to convert it into a sustainable service from a social, environmental, economic, and financial point of view.