Turnstile politics: practices of care and mobility justice in Santiago’s public transport system

Abstract

Modern public transport systems are typically designed by following universal aspirations to predictability and standardisation. In the case of Santiago’s public transport, however, this design philosophy has often translated into concrete, practical struggles for users with more vulnerable corporealities. In analysing the case of a controversial turnstile installed in Santiago’s buses in 2016, this paper draws on video analysis to examine how passengers respond to, and locally deal with, its exclusionary design. Passengers’ interactions with this technology demonstrate how the turnstile is taken up as more than a mere sorting device, to become a matter of concern around mobility (in)justice. A detailed analysis of these interactions – through ethnomethodological analysis of video data – describes how passengers respond to the turnstile’s exclusionary design by deploying diverse embodied practices of care towards other users experiencing trouble with it. Such practices of care align with a grounded, embodied sense of mobility (in)justice as opposed to more abstract understandings of distributive justice. The paper concludes by discussing the potential forpublic transport systems to become more just and inclusive environments designed as infrastructures of care, whereby materialities may not only allow, but support, practices of care among users.

Keywords:

• Mobility justice
• care
• embodied practices
• everyday mobilities
• public transport
• turnstiles

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sam Mutter and Peter Merriman for their outstanding support throughout the writing process. Thank you as well to two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful comments were crucial to improve this paper. I would also like to thank Metbus S.A. for their collaboration.

Ethical approval

The research supporting this article was granted ethical approval by the University of Edinburgh’s Research Ethics and Integrity Committee (School of Geosciences).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data presented in this article was collected a few months before Transantiago’s name was formally changed to ‘Red Metropolitana de Movilidad’ (Red) in 2019. In practice, however, the system is still widely known as Transantiago, being called that in everyday interactions and even by the mainstream media. Regardless of its official name, Santiago’s public transport system has kept and continued to install turnstiles in its buses as a long-lived policy to halt fare evasion despite numerous denouncements against them (Vega 2023) and data suggesting that is cumbersome to passengers, especially in the opinion of women and older people (Brújula 2017).

2 The only exception occurs when changing from a bus to the metro, in which case a small added fare (USD 0.022) is charged to the Bip card.

3 Enforcing fare payment, within the previous ‘yellow buses’ system, was in the bus drivers’ own interest as their salary was directly derived from sold tickets. Under Transantiago, before turnstiles were installed, bus drivers earned a fixed wage but were still required by the transport operators to ensure that users paid the fare, with detrimental effects on their mental health (Arias-Meléndez et al. 2022)

4 This man is a transport worker from a different transport company, who is seemingly off-duty and travelling as a regular passenger.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chilean National Commission for Science and Technology (Conicyt), PFCHA/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2015, under grant number [72160153] and the University of Oxford John Fell Fund, under grant number [0011326].