Persistence of walking in Chile: lessons for urban sustainability

ABSTRACT

An extensive body of work from the urban planning, health, and other disciplines has documented the importance of walking to urban sustainability from health, safety, security, environmental and other perspectives. These studies come mainly from countries in North America and Europe, where the majority of the population relies on cars for transportation. Notwithstanding, in many countries in the Global South, walking remains a majority transport mode, while cars increasingly dominate the urban streetscape, but are accessible only to a minority of the population. Chile provides fertile terrain for studying this phenomenon. This article reviews current practice and recent research of walking in Chile, in light of international findings regarding walkability, equity and urban sustainability. To elaborate an overview of the depth and breadth of walking in Chile, an interdisciplinary team conducted a literature review, examined relevant case study material from experience from Chile and in particular from Santiago, and triangulated this mainly qualitative data with results from the origin-destination survey applied in Chile’s main cities, Chilean traffic safety data) and results from official transport reports of other Latin American cities [Tirachini, A. (2019). South America: The challenge of transition. In J. Stanley & D. Hensher (Eds.), A research agenda for transport policy. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing]. Findings show that despite priority public investments that have largely prioritised infrastructure for cars, walking in Chile has remained as the majority transport mode up until today, especially for lower-middle income groups, and particularly for care-related tasks performed mainly by women. In this sense, walking in Chile has proven remarkably persistent. The importance of walking as the main transport mode, against the odds, reflects economic, cultural, and urban form determinants, which are explored in this article. Furthermore, a recent upsurge in public interest and community design initiatives to improve walking, particularly the generation of a Chilean approach to “complete streets” has emerged, opening up opportunities to challenge Chile’s version of automobility in favour of more equitable, active and public transportation modes. There is, therefore, in Chile an opportunity to prioritise the walking mode, improve infrastructure for walkers and build from preserving current high pedestrian modal shares, rather than having to reverse widespread car use, as occurs in many countries in Europe and North America. This potential is highly relevant as these conditions are similar to those in other Latin American cities and, potentially, other cities elsewhere in the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Walking
• walkability
• urban planning
• equity
• Chile
• Santiago

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Marie Geraldine Herrmann-Lunecke http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0186-441X

Lake Sagaris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9162-5190

Notes

1 Chile’s Transportation Secretary (Sectra, 2012) defines a trip as a displacement made in the public realm with a specific purpose between two places (origin and destination). A trip can be done in various transport modes and consist of one or more stages. A walking trip is defined as a trip made by foot only.

2 It is worth noting that the 2012 Santiago survey included in total 45 comunas, while the 2002 Santiago survey only included 38 comunas.

3 It is important to note that “low-income” denotes a majority of Chilean households, in one of the world’s least equal economies, with 50% earning less than US$562/month (World Bank, 2014).

4 Notably, a national network of civil society foundations and activists campaigned for six years to get road speeds reduced.

5 This scheme has so far transformed sixty decaying commercial precincts in all regions of Chile (Sercotec, 2018).

6 Indeed, according to a recent research carried out in Santiago, internet searches for flats passed from 59% to 78% in the largest real estate web engine of Chile (La Tercera, 2018), reflecting a change in people’s living preferences.

7 Notwithstanding, walking has even declined in Western Europe, such as in Germany (by 30%), the UK (by 50%) and in France (by 56%) over the last thirty years, a period where per capita income grew (Buehler & Pucher, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CONICYT under [grant Proyecto Fondecyt Regular N°1170292], and the Centro de Estudios de Desarrollo Urbano Sustentable (CEDEUS) supported by CONICYT under [grant FONDAP N°15110020].