Abstract
Lima, as the capital of Peru, has become its first megacity with more than 10 million people in an area that extends over 80 km in a North-South direction. As a city of this size, it faces complex mobility issues with a strong reliance on informal transport modes (buses, minibuses, and paratransit vehicles) due to the deterioration of its transit system quality during the 20th century. This paper examines the current urban situation in Lima through an analysis of the city’s structure, with an emphasis on its transport history and the resulting types of walking, transit, and car-oriented fabrics that can be identified. The mobility analysis was made through data collection, including daily trips by public and private modes, annual passenger kilometers and vehicle kilometers of travel, length of exclusive lanes for public transport and freeways, car and paratransit modes ownership, transport emissions, and safety. These data are used to position Lima in a comparative global context showing its relative strengths and weaknesses in urban form and mobility and providing suggestions for a more sustainable transport and land use system. It is asserted that Lima is an informal transit-oriented city, as distinct from recognized transit metropolises (e.g., Tokyo or German cities such as Berlin or Munich), which often involve private companies, operating under an umbrella of strong government regulation, fare setting, and high service standards. Lima is shown to have some important qualities such as a high density, comparatively low car ownership and freeway provision and still healthy levels of transit and non-motorized mode use despite non-ideal conditions for either. These qualities, if combined with effective governance structures, government commitment to higher quality formal transit systems, which better integrate the important informal transit sector, cessation of high capacity road building, greater protection and encouragement for non-motorized modes and some effective controls over growing car and motorcycle ownership, would see Lima develop a more sustainable transport system.
Highlights
The city of Lima is the capital of the Republic of Peru, a Latin American emerging economy.The history of the City of Kings traces back to Pre-Hispanic times but it was officially founded by Spanish colonizers as the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1535
Callao’s history traces back to colonial times when it was founded in 1537 as the main port of the Viceroyalty of Peru. It thrived during the 19th century with the building of the railway Lima-Callao and received the name of Constitutional Province in 1857. Notwithstanding this growth, its physical decline began during the 20th century when some of the first barriadas appeared along the axes of Callao-Lima [12]
The remainder of available land was rapidly urbanized at the end of the 1990s and by the beginning of the 2000s these extended beyond the limits of Metropolitan Lima [15]
Summary
The city of Lima is the capital of the Republic of Peru, a Latin American emerging economy. A mobility analysis of Lima is provided, with the history of the transit modes that have appeared and disappeared, including the arrival of the automobile and current paratransit/informal transit modes This investigation identifies and distinguishes the different types of urban fabrics in the metropolitan area: walking, transit and car-oriented areas. Surveys from international agencies, governmental reports and statistics, as well as evaluations carried out by urban observatories were examined From these numbers, comparisons were made with the situation of other individual cities and more generally, representative samples of American, Australian, Canadian, European and Asian cities to find where Lima is positioned in a global perspective on key transport-related indicators. These results are used to assess future prospects for Lima and provide recommendations about tasks and priorities required to improve its current situation
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