Bogotá Archives - Institute for Transportation and Development Policy

by Julien Vincelot and Patrin Watanatada, Bernard van Leer Foundation

If you were in Los Angeles one morning last September, you might have noticed small groups of adults making their way downtown on foot while pushing empty strollers or carrying bags of rice as heavy as an 18-month-old child. These men and women had come from Amsterdam, California, Dakar, London, Madrid, New York City, Shenzhen, Tel Aviv, and other cities to contribute their expertise to an Urban95 meeting on urban transport for families, hosted by the Bernard van Leer Foundation. Urban95 asks city leaders, planners, designers, and engineers: “If you could experience the city from 95 cm—the height of a three year old— what would you change?”

Babies and toddlers deserve a good start in life, and the best way to achieve that is to support the people who care for them. So, what does this have to do with transportation?

Urban Transportation and the Developing Brain

Between conception and age three, the brain is developing rapidly and is more sensitive to external experiences and inputs—both negative and positive—than at any other time in life. These experiences set the foundation for health and learning in later childhood and into adulthood. And they are powerfully influenced by the mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, siblings, friends, and professionals who care for them. These primary caregivers not only influence the quality of food, play, and healthcare but they also provide warm, responsive human interactions that the developing brain depends on to build neural connections.

Urban transportation can affect the quality of the experiences that shape the developing brain— for good and for bad. It affects access to healthy food, healthcare, childcare, and other key early childhood services. The quality of transportation and planning affects the extent to which pregnant women, babies, and toddlers can access the services they need for healthy development: sources of healthy food, well-baby clinics, and other primary healthcare, childcare, parks, and play spaces.

It can cause stress for caregivers. Traveling in the city can be tiring, long, stressful, or dangerous for caregivers, which affects the quality and amount of responsive care they can provide.

It can pollute the air. For children under five, the top two causes of death are preterm birth complications and lower respiratory illnesses. In urban areas, air pollution from vehicles is a significant contributor to both. What’s more, the damage air pollution causes to still-maturing brains and lungs—asthma, cancer, cognitive impairment, and reduced lung functioning—can last a lifetime.

How City Planners and Transport Agencies Can Build Healthy Brains

Better walking and cycling infrastructure, widespread, affordable and safe public transportation, and low-emission zones benefit every urban dweller, including babies, toddlers, and the people who care for them. But until these exist throughout every city, we encourage cities to prioritize the health of their youngest residents and the adults they will become by considering the following:

20-minute (or less) neighborhoods for babies. City planning for the needs of pregnant women, babies, and toddlers starts with understanding where they live and where they need to go. Shortening distances to key early childhood services is one of the best things a city can do for the healthy development of its babies and toddlers. Researchers at Turkey’s Kadir Has University and the TESEV thinktank have produced Istanbul’s first map of children under five by income level, and some of its municipalities are beginning to use the map to plan home visits and public spaces. In Tel Aviv, Israel, the departments of Community, Culture & Sports and Social Services are collaborating to share physical facilities to locate early childhood services closer to families. This is being piloted in five community centers with the goal to allow parents to walk to well-baby clinics.

Caregivers have different travel patterns than daily home-to-work commuters.

Measures that accommodate the needs of caregivers traveling with small children could include universal transit cards or timebased systems that allow passengers to transfer without needing to pay again, predictable schedules that make it easier to plan multi-leg journeys and reduce waiting times, and measures to make public transportation and sidewalks safer from harassment and violence, as well as more accessible for strollers or people juggling packages and children. Recife, Brazil—which approved a city-wide early childhood policy earlier this year—is upgrading streets, sidewalks, and stairs near the Compaz Centres, its flagship network of community centers providing services to families and adolescents. São Paulo, Brazil, has provided pregnant women with vouchers for free transportation to travel to prenatal appointments. Meanwhile, Santiago, Chile, is experimenting with anonymized mobile phone data to better understand how women move through the city.

Photo: Courtesy of Max Pixel

Plan for the types of journeys made by caregivers— especially women. Planning mobility for children under five is largely about planning for the people they travel with. In many cities, this is still mostly women. Journeys made by caregivers tend to involve many stops to run errands and tend to the needs of the child, and often take place at off-peak times, compared to journeys made by people who are mostly traveling between home and work. Yet transport planners tend not to recognize “trips made while caring for others” as a distinct category. University of Madrid professor Inés Sánchez de Madariaga is working to change that through her work on “the mobility of care.”
Prioritize the routes and destinations most important to babies, toddlers, and the people who care for them. It’s overwhelming to think of improving every street and sidewalk in a city. Boa Vista, Brazil is working to identify the routes taken by families to early childhood services to make them safer. The city is also working with older children to use GPS to define the routes they take from home to school and other destinations. Andres Sevtsuk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design uses probability analysis to prioritize the routes most likely to be taken by people trying to reach a given set of destinations and has applied this technique to the routes that small children take to reach playgrounds in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Design child-friendly streets. For babies and toddlers, safer roads mean both traffic safety and reducing air pollution. The Global Designing Cities Initiative is working on a Streets for Kids supplement to its Global Street Design Guide that provides technical guidance on designing streets that serve both as safer transport corridors and spaces for vibrant public life. Bogotá, Colombia is piloting some of these techniques for colorful pedestrian routes and traffic calming paint jobs in its Children’s Priority Zone. In Barranquilla, Colombia, two grownups for every two dozen children lead “walking buses” along pre-established routes to keep preschoolers and older children safe on their journeys to school.
Create walkable cities. There are dozens of reasons to make a city more walkable. For babies, toddlers, and their caregivers, not only is walking good exercise and free—it is predictable, reducing stress on already stressed caregivers. And at its best, walking through city streets creates a stream of interesting sights, sounds, and people for small children to experience.
Make travel fun. City dwellers can spend hours a day in transit. Some recent projects to turn travel into moments for learning and love include Urban Thinkscape’s work to convert a Philadelphia bus stop and the vacant lot next to it into science-based early learning spaces; ImagiNation Afrika’s work in Dakar, Senegal, to promote play between parents and children on buses; and the Boston Basics-inspired project in São Paulo, Brazil, to post billboard messages to encourage caregivers to talk, sing, and play with small children.
Finally, regulate cars in places where small children spend the most time. Cities around the world from Paris to Jakarta have established or are considering partial or even permanent bans on cars in the city center, to reduce congestion, improve air quality, and make room for a growing population. We’d like to see this near places where babies and toddlers spend the most time, like the play streets near schools and in neighborhoods filled with families in Los Angeles, Bogotá, London, and Libreville (to name just a few).

Since BRT was born in Latin America in 1974 in Curitiba, Brazil, more than 20 systems have opened and are currently operating in Latin America, with key systems in Bogota and Quito now over 15 years old. Much of the focus on BRT, from advocates to planners and engineers to politicians, has traditionally been on planning and designing the BRT corridor just to reach the “ribbon-cutting” phase with little thought to sustaining operations afterwards. Cities and system operators often struggle with maintaining high-quality operations and integration in order to continue to attract ridership.

To address these issues with the region that has the most experience with BRT, ITDP convened a group of practitioners and decision makers to discuss the state of BRT from October 31- November 1, 2018 in Mexico City. This experience-sharing workshop was supported by the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI) and the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The workshop aimed to discover common operational problems and disseminate better BRT operation strategies that can be expanded or replicated into other systems, including in other regions such as Asia and Africa. In order to enrich the dialogue, experts and partners from WRI Brazil, WRI Mexico, BRT Center of Excellence, and 100 Resilient Cities were also invited and presented case studies, summing a total of 30 participants.

Participants at the Latin-American Experience-Sharing Workshop on BRT and Bus-Based Systems

Photos of BRT systems of cities that participated in the activity

Cities that have participated in the activity

The workshop was based on the presentation of twelve case studies by eleven different cities from six Latin American countries:

México City and Puebla from México
Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo from Brazil
Santiago from Chile
Barranquilla and Bogotá from Colombia
Quito from Ecuador
Guatemala City from Guatemala

From the 12 studies, ITDP selected the cases that responded the most to the systems’ main challenges and populated the responses in the graphs seen below:

Most relevant BRT and bus-based systems challenges according to a survey conducted with over 20 Latin-American managers
(click to enlarge)

Strategies presented included solutions for operations funding, institutional integration, fare evasion, frequent bus network design, regularity on both trunk and feeder lines, and tactical interventions for improved access among others. Service regularity was the most recurring technical topic mentioned in the discussions. According to participants and experts, offering rapid services on trunk routes is not enough. Especially as new and competing transport modes arise, it is imperative that users are confident that service will be consistent from starting point to destination. This need imposes a special challenge for trunk and feeder systems and routes that run in mixed-traffic.

A few Latin American cities are implementing strategies to combat this problem. Bogotá’s TransMilenio is working on improving the precision of inter-corridor routes’ cycle time through the use of statistical methods, while Belo Horizonte has recently deployed simple measures such as shifting feeder routes’ control points from the neighborhoods to the terminals to guarantee on schedule departure times from terminals during peak times. São Paulo has implemented continuous operational procedures that give more control to the transit agencies instead of private operators, including advance knowledge of which bus and driver are assigned to specific routes. The BRT Centre of Excellence is testing new technologies in Santiago (and Sweden) that should make it easier for drivers to know whether they should go faster or slower in order to keep route service punctual and consistent.

Reliable service is one of the most important factors in gaining ridership and innovative and holistic approaches are necessary to achieve reliable service. However, these approaches do not always involve new technology. The city of Barranquilla invested in a culture strengthening program that allocated staff to system stations. The staff provided educational information for the users regarding fare media usage, respecting the system preferential seats, and queueing in stations. The program used this educational approach instead of simply enforcing and fining bad behavior, resulting in reduced fare evasion and vandalism to the system. Guatemala converted important streets near the BRT main stations into pedestrian-only, improving access, facilitating commercial activities and services to flourish and improve security. Learning from the implementation of the first Metrobus, Mexico City started to implement a series of improvements for pedestrian access to new corridor stations. During the workshop, participants visited the thriving areas around Metrobus lines 3 and 4 in downtown Mexico City.

The road to reliable, seamlessly integrated and attractive BRT and bus-based systems is complex and multidisciplinary. The convening of high-level BRT and bus system managers from key Latin-American cities where these systems are more mature represents a unique opportunity to improve operational strategies to increase the longevity of the BRT systems. With participants’ know-how, specially tailored peer exchanges, and international experts’ inputs, the workshop allowed decision makers to increase their ability to advance on their own technical and governance issues. At the same time, conclusions distilled from the discussions will also prove beneficial to systems operating in other world regions in subsequent years. The workshop was a small but important step on the road to global BRT system transformation that highlighted the necessity to continue the development of spaces for dialogue between different entities involved in the planning, implementing, and operating public transport systems to guarantee the development of more sustainable and inclusive cities and metropolitan regions around the world.

The Effects of Transportation on Early Childhood Development

by Julien Vincelot and Patrin Watanatada, Bernard van Leer Foundation

Improving BRT Systems in Latin America