Ariana Salas Castillo, a postdoctoral researcher at CSUD, has been selected to be part of the Columbia Global Center's first cohort of Scholars-in-Residence. Castillo will be serving her residency at Columbia Global Center Santiago.
Santiago has become a referent in Latin America for its innovation and investments to ameliorate public transportation. The Red Metropolitana de Movilidad, how the public transportation system is now named, has one of the world’s largest electric bus fleets, is addressing gender challenges by training women as bus drivers and dealing with women’s harassment in buses, and is expanding bus routes through participatory cartography to under- and non-served boroughs such as Padre Hurtado and Lampa. Nevertheless, notwithstanding these innovative and inclusive investments, we are not seeing significant and proportional changes in expected outcomes, such as public bus ridership, congestion and the purchase of private vehicles. Why is this the case? By examining which and how public bus and private transportation policies have been implemented in the last two decades in Santiago, this research project aims to unwrap the mechanisms that might be leading to this unexpected outcome.
