I am now two weeks in Santiago and it seems pretty obvious to me that the ways of getting around pose a bit of a problem here. Even though you can find all sorts of means of mobility here, there are two types of transportation that make this city a congested, air-polluted beast: cars and old buses.

The old, yellow micros that are racing with each other on the streets to get the most customers cause with 33% the biggest part of air pollution (read: smog) in Santiago. For those buses there are many companies that are not much interested in the ideas of community transport but getting the most bucks for the bang. Sure, it is better to have some noisy, dirty buses driving around than 20 times as much cars, but sometimes it seems that one bus is just like 20 cars in one package.

The group of cars is just as disasterous in my eyes: the streets are theirs, the police seems to be ignorant, and pedestrians don’t have a crush-collapsible zone. The respect on the motorists’ side towards their contemporaries on the sidewalks and crosswalks seems to be a bit out of proportion. I have already encountered an adrenalin-pushing situation when a car was turning into the street with such a speed that didn’t know what to do. Not to mention that the traffic light was on my legal side.

Well, those cars make up 27% of contamination in Santiago. Further 16% are produced by trucks. Taken together buses, cars, and trucks cause 77% of air pollution in Santiago. The rest is mostly caused by industry and residentials.

On the other side, there is a metro that is used by many people everyday. This metro is being extended and seems to me a viable alternative to motorist congestion and contamination. The metro extension is undertaken under the umbrella of the government’s plan Transantiago under which also new types of buses are introduced that have better ecological features. Furthermore some parlamentarians think about introducing a type of car toll for the central city. This idea is attacked by the right-wing UDI calling it an inacceptable scandal.

It seems to me that Santiago is so motorized that change from community destroying to enabling forms of transport is very hard to undertake. But still there are many pedestrians and some bicyclists that want to move differently.

(Figures for air pollution taken from the newspaper La Tercera from the 11.4.06, p19. Original source Auditoria al Plan de Prevención y Descontaminación de la Región Metropolitana 2006.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 2:18 pm and is filed under english, mobility, santiago. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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