Urban Transport Plans in Chile: The Inclusion of Sustainable Modes of Transportation in Public Infrastructure Projects

Abstract

The urban transport plans in Chile have had a successful development in the last decades, mainly due to economic growth and to better practices in public policies, but, above all, to the central administration’s need for planning and organizing the state’s traffic. This article aims to demonstrate how this country adopted an urban mobility culture to include more sustainable modes of transportations in its public infrastructure. Firstly, this study exposes the situation of urban transportation before the assumption of new policies by the central government, in which the main issue lied on poor management and a lack of organization. Followingly, an analysis of the results of projects developed after such reforms, is presented. Overall, deriving from these results, this study provides evidence for the following: an increase in the inclusion of sustainable modes of transportation in Chile’s infrastructure projects, and a slight decrease in the relative importance of private modes of transportation, compared to the past.