Getting from Here to There
Informality and accessibility challenges in Bogotá, Colombia
Passengers scramble for buses in Bogotá and climb aboard the speedy but crowded public transport system that traverses this sprawling city of seven million people, the capital of Colombia. Cyclists whiz by in designated lanes and taxis move from here to there in what seem to be endless traffic jams. The city has traditionally been divided between the poor southern part of the city and the more affluent north, but improvements in transport have slowly begun to break down those barriers. It’s not just about better infrastructure—along with infrastructure can come civic pride.
Neighborhood improvement through comprehensive public transport projects can make possible positive transformations. This is the case of TransMiCable, where residents take pride in their neighborhood and see improvements in safety and travel time: “Before, they used to say: ‘No, I’m not going to Ciudad Bolívar’ [a well-known district in the south], but now anyone wants to come to Ciudad Bolívar, even if it’s only to ride the TransMiCable. They will have another way of thinking when they come.” This reminds us that the human element must always be at the center of the urban mobility discussions and the main target of governments has to be to improve the welfare of citizens, especially the often-overlooked poor living on the literal margins. Such actions can make an enormous difference in the already challenging situation of those in a vulnerable situation.
A common sight across Bogotá is that of men and women working in the informal economy. Whether selling food on the streets or opening an unlicensed car repair shop across the city, millions of Bogotanos resort to informal activities to secure their livelihoods. It is precisely the needs of those workers that have to be taken into consideration when thinking about developing public transport from a perspective of inclusion and social justice.
From informal work to housing and transport, informality is present in all determinants of access to employment for many urban dwellers in rapidly growing cities in the Global South. According to the International Labour Organisation, 62% of all workers globally are in informal employment. In Colombia, estimates from 2019 suggest that this percentage was above 62.1% before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the region. Considering the scale of the informal sector, the role of transport in enabling access to employment needs to be questioned in terms of its ability to enable workers from all socioeconomic levels and forms of employment to reach their income sources and expand their potential to engage with the city’s economy.
The pandemic gave rise to some popular solutions such as pop-up infrastructure for cycling and other forms of sustainable transport. The pressing issue became how to develop alternative forms of connecting informal workers to the places where they work and, at the same time, to improve the built environment, using mechanisms that have been popularized in light of the pandemic.
Bogotá is doing lots of things right—but it still has a ways to go in meeting the basic needs of many of its citizens. It boasts some of the most iconic forms of public transport in the region, embodied by its Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, Transmilenio, and a recently inaugurated aerial cable car, TransMiCable, connecting one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city with its BRT network. Despite being hailed as an iconic case of progressive urban transport policies in Latin America, Bogotá also grapples with significant rates of informal employment and a socioeconomic makeup that is unequal at its best and exclusionary at its worst. This leads to high transport expenditures for the poor, who spend long travel times to access employment from rapidly urbanizing peripheries, also marked by informal housing and transport. Such conditions make Bogotá an ideal case to illustrate the achievements, failures, and challenges associated with access to employment, serving as an example of larger dynamics commonly found across Latin American cities.
The segregated city, the concentration of employment and the peripheral poor
Large concentrations of economic activities in the eastern edge of the city are compounded by a land-use market that has driven up prices for decades in proximity to the main hubs of formal employment, becoming prohibitive for a majority of the population. Land occupation trends indicate a concentration of low-income settlements in the south and southwest of the city, with the wealthiest areas located in the northeast (as seen in Figure 1). As available land within the city’s boundaries runs out and costs increase, urban trends suggest that most of the urban growth will occur outside the city (neighboring municipalities) where most of the inhabitants will be either low or middle-income.
Figure 1. Population and employment location / Figura 1. Localización de empleos y población
This situation has given rise to important differences in the population and employment location throughout the city (see Figure 1). The unsatisfactory demand for affordable housing has encouraged people to occupy mostly unplanned and informal urban settlements, mainly in the second half of the 20th century. As a consequence, many informal neighborhoods emerged on the city periphery with poor urban living conditions. The densest neighborhoods are in the low-income zones near the southern and western borders of the urban area, where they can reach densities of up to 140,000 inh/mile2, and the two most crowded are in consolidated zones that started out as informal communities. Meanwhile, tall buildings, high-level formal employment and fewer people per square mile are common in the city’s central locations.
Despite the construction of the Transmilenio system, the current spatial mismatch—where people can get to easily and where they need to be— makes travel times remain very high, particularly for the low-income population. Since the poorest households live mainly on urban fringes, away from the main employment centers, the effects of such a spatial mismatch widen the inequality gap because travel costs are high, consuming much of already low income.
What accessibility to (formal) employment tells us
City-planning, design and public transport services must go hand in hand. Unfortunately, uncontrolled population growth in the periphery without urban amenities, services, and transport, this does not happen. This means community residents suffer from inadequate transport and are not integrated into the life of the city. The point is that not all public transport is created equal, especially when it comes to serving poorer citizens. Transmilenio tried to reverse this situation, improving access for these communities, although great challenges remain. One of those is access to employment: Public transport accessibility analysis suggests larger benefits in and around the wealthiest areas.
The spatial distribution of opportunities and transport services increase accessibility by public transport for short trips, while longer trips may benefit more from the availability of Transmilenio. This means that job accessibility for the wealthiest group is between 11% and 31% higher than the city average, regardless of how people get from one place to another. Recent studies suggest a negative effect of the spatial distribution of opportunities and public transport on equity, mainly to the poorest residents. Some people suggest that the poor could get around by biking, but we’ve found that low-income citizens have to travel disproportionately farther compared to wealthier ones. This also means marked differences in job accessibility between the cycling population, where up to 90% of the analyzed users have access to 30% of the job opportunities. The fact that it is harder to get to jobs strongly correlates with high levels of inequality both for motorized modes and the bicycle as suggested by previous research in the same context.
The improvements in coverage resulting from the integration of public transport, cycling infrastructure and transport subsidies for the poorest are intermediate requirements for enabling low-income communities to access more and better opportunities for employment. However, the public transport system faces serious problems of overcrowding and affordability. Bogotá has gone a long way in providing public transport services throughout the city but there is still a long way (and expensive) to go. Currently, more lines of Transmilenio are under construction (other more are proposed), the first Metro line is also under construction, and the implementation of new cable cars is also expected. Of course, that will not be enough. We must also think about improving the infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists (and their safety) and without a doubt, make the use of cars and motorcycles less attractive and expensive.
Differences between the formal and informal job market
Almost one out of every two laborers in Bogotá work informally (around 48%). And most of these informal jobs are also concentrated and located on the eastern edge of the city. Therefore, the effects of the current spatial configuration of the city and public transport networks on improving accessibility to quality job opportunities imply a higher dependency on informal jobs as productive exclusion.
An analysis of travel destinations of workers living in zones with different informality rates shows how job locations vary, with more significant concentrations of informal workers testing how clusters of informal destinations are similar to those of formal workers. The informality rate in Figure 2 reflects the percentage of informal workers, understood as all workers who do not pay for their healthcare, are not registered in the pensions system, and do not have a written contract for their job. Such an analysis shows a high spatial correlation between poverty, low land values, densities, housing informality, and job informality. These conditions represent intersecting social disadvantages, which are reinforced by the fact that the city’s fringes have inadequate transport infrastructure. The informal worker lives in dense and low-income neighborhoods, many of which are of informal origin, adding a layer of complexity to structural processes of segregation and exclusion resulting from the way transport and urban development has taken place in Bogotá over the years.
Figure 2. Employment informality rate at the household / Figura 2. Tasas de empleo informal en origen
As shown in Figure 3 below, as the concentration of informal workers increases, destinations for informal jobs narrows down very quickly to hotspots. In the case of formal jobs, clusters of high demand coincide with the aggregated destinations on the eastern edge of the city. The opposite applies for high concentrations of informal workers, suggesting that commuters in areas where a majority of the residents work in the informal economy travel more frequently to a single, well-defined hotspot, near the older part of the eastern edge. Considering Bogotá’s segregated urban structure, highlighted results in Figure 3 suggest that citizens in the zones with a higher concentration of informality have higher travel costs and lower connectivity via high-capacity public transport. Such relationships have implications for transport supply and demand, as well as for the economic geography of Bogotá, contributing to understanding what the contribution of public transport and connectivity to informal job supply is. The fact that the main cluster of informal jobs is spatially closer to the ‘informal city’, as well as to the southern end of the city where more impoverished and less-connected neighborhoods concentrate, indicates a systematic bypassing of socially vulnerable populations in the process of transport planning and delivery.
Figure 3. Work-trip destinations by the concentration of formality/informality in the origin. / Figura 3. Destinos de empleo de acuerdo a la concentración formal/informal en origen
Looking forward, how to make it easier for the poor to access formal employment?
Economic segregation goes hand-in-hand with low mobility and accessibility. When all the low-income people live separated from everyone else and economic centers, fewer people make it up the economic ladder. In this context, we have to take a close look at the intersections between transport disadvantages with social disadvantages associated with precarious livelihoods and limited participation in the formal economy.
The case of Bogotá shows explicit relationships between the socio-spatial and productive distribution of the city and observable levels of exclusion. The uneven provision of public transport combined with a segregated distribution of housing has created and reinforced the dynamics of exclusion from the formal job market in the city. The distribution of hotspots of destinations of formal and informal workers suggests a quantitative and spatial imbalance in the availability of opportunities available for workers with different levels of inclusion in the formal economy.
Findings highlighted the scale of job informality and how it relates to other mechanisms of urban development such as informal housing (i.e., the informal worker tends to live in the “informal city”). Recognizing that nearly half of Bogotá’s population still has no access to non-precarious employment conditions (productive exclusion), puts into perspective the role of transport in increasing accessibility as a way to reduce social exclusion.
Little by little, Bogotá has increased its high capacity public transport, catering first to the formal demand and supply of employment, following traditional paradigms of transport planning and contributing to urban dynamics such as splintering urbanism. Although the current transport structure provides better coverage than before it was implemented, higher capacity still focuses on included and high and middle-income areas. Looking at the accessibility of informal workers has added value when considering the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and its current manifestation in Latin American cities. The narrow hotspot of destinations of informal workers maintains a unidirectional pattern for travel for people already in conditions of exclusion. Such populations have an explicit need to maintain livelihoods and income despite having limited or no access to healthcare and social security. Addressing such a challenge requires a better spatial understanding of the travel needs of those experiencing different levels of exclusion from the formal economy.
Fall 2021, Volume XXI, Number 1
Luis A. Guzman is an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). His research interests include urban mobility, transport and land-use interaction and social, economic and spatial analysis of inequalities related to urban transport and policy evaluation in Latin America. He is also a consultant and adviser in different urban transport projects in Colombia and author of several articles published in international journals related to the evaluation of transport policies, poverty, equity and urban structure.
Daniel Oviedo is Assistant Professor at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit of University College London. An engineer and development planner by training, Daniel has over 10 years of experience in the analysis of social and spatial inequalities of urban mobility, and the role of formal and informal transport on social inclusion and well-being in cities of Latin America and Africa.
Luis A. Guzman es Profesor Asociado de la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Guzmán está interesado en la movilidad urbana, el transporte y su interacción con los usos del suelo y el análisis social, económico y espacial de las desigualdades relacionadas con el transporte urbano y la evaluación de políticas en América Latina. También es consultor y asesor en diferentes proyectos de transporte urbano en Colombia. Autor de varios artículos publicados en revistas internacionales relacionados con la evaluación de políticas de transporte, pobreza, equidad y estructura urbana.
Daniel Oviedo es Profesor Asistente en la Bartlett Development Planning Unit del University College London. Ingeniero de formación, El tiene más de 10 años de experiencia en el análisis de las desigualdades sociales y espaciales de la movilidad urbana y el papel del transporte formal e informal en la inclusión social y el bienestar en ciudades de América Latina y África.
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