Perhaps the most important issue facing the city of Lima, Peru is its crippling congestion. Congestion has impacted economic development in the city, has disproportionately affected lower-income residents, and has made Lima the city with the second slowest traffic in all of Latin America (TomTom 2024). The city is currently using some key strategies to address its congestion problem, including building out a formal higher-order transit network and stepping up regulation of the city’s many informal transport alternatives. However, Lima must implement further measures to best tackle its congestion problem, including integrated regional transit planning, urban polycentrism, better prioritization of different transport projects, and further regulation of informal transit services within the city.
One major factor contributing to Lima’s congestion is migration patterns; as poor migrants flocked to the city in search of economic opportunity, the only places they could afford to settle were far from the city center (Yuen 2024). This has led to tremendous long distance commuting demand as these new city residents travel to and from work each day. Another factor driving congestion is informal transportation options. In 1991, Decree 651 was passed in Peru in response to the deterioration of the formal public transit system, largely deregulating transit provision and allowing for a plethora of private transport operations to spin up (Jauregui et al. 2024). This expansion of unregulated transportation options contributed to an increase in congestion on Lima’s roads; “between 1990 and 2000, these informal units increased from 10,500 to 47,000, transporting passengers from one extreme of the city to the other by always crossing through the center” (Jauregui et al. 2024). The concentration of traffic in the city center was particularly troublesome and is emblematic of Lima’s unique land use challenges. These challenges include a lack of mixed-use land (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). This necessarily means that residential areas and employment centers are not co-located, requiring longer-distance travel for the city’s millions of daily commuters, worsening congestion. The lack of mixed-use land ties in closely with Lima’s unbalanced density, with high densities both in the city center and near the fringe where new migrants live (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). Despite the higher densities in these urban fringe communities, residents of those areas largely commute closer to the city center for work, again worsening congestion. Finally, Lima also lacks a robust integrated planning framework, leaving housing, transportation, and other considerations to be planned separately by different bodies (López-Varela and Moreno 2020).
Congestion has had definitive negative impacts on Lima and its residents. Congestion has slowed economic development in the region and has made Lima less competitive relative to its Latin American peers (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). Long commute times have also acted as an exclusion factor; for example, 25% of Lima residents spend more than two hours on daily commuting trips (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). The weight of these long commute times is disproportionately borne by residents with lower incomes, who could otherwise use that commuting time to earn more wages, improving their financial situation (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). Another example of an exclusionary transportation force is the informal transit regime within Lima: since fares are entirely unregulated, informal transit operators can charge vastly varying fares based on geography and distance (CE Noticias Financieras, English Ed. 2023). Practices such as geographic price discrimination within the unregulated transit fare regime lead to severe compression of household budgets; research in Lima found that “considering that they charge an average of between S/5 and S/8 per trip per person, taking this type of informal service 5 days a week implies an expense of approximately S/214 per month for the user, which is 11.6% of the average monthly labor income in Metropolitan Lima” (CE Noticias Financieras, English Ed. 2023). This compression of household budgets is again disproportionately affecting low-income residents.
Aside from economic and social consequences, Lima’s congestion also has environmental and public health consequences. The sheer number of vehicles on the city’s roads, including loosely regulated informal transit vehicles, has caused Lima to have the second-highest concentration of airborne PM10 particles among all Latin American cities (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). 30% of Lima’s carbon emissions come from transportation, and the resulting poor air quality has detrimental public health impacts on the city’s population (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). Further public health impacts emerge from issues such as infectious disease risk. A 2007 study found that users of informal transit were at a higher risk for contracting pulmonary tuberculosis, saying that “overcrowding, exposure to persons with productive coughs while commuting two times a day five days a week, and closed windows on [informal transit] minibuses, combined with a high prevalence of pulmonary TB in Lima, increase the risk of acquiring this disease” (Horna-Campos et al. 2007). The lack of public health safety during commutes is then exacerbated by the length of said commutes, with longer times spent in informal transit vehicles leading to even more potential disease exposure.
Lima’s current approach to tackling its congestion problem involves the continuing construction of higher order transit infrastructure, the formalization of public transit, and stepping up enforcement actions. Lima is aggressively expanding its Metro, with the first phase of Line 1 opening in 2012 and more lines opening since (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). Along with Line 1 (which travels north-south), Line 2 connects east-west (Jauregui et al. 2024). Further expansion of the Metro is planned, including entirely new lines and extensions of existing ones (Yuen 2024). Lima also has a 26km bus rapid transit (BRT) route, referred to as the Metropolitano; the BRT line parallels much of Line 1, running to its west (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). The building out of formal, grade-separated transit services is allowing Lima to catch up to many of its Latin American peers in this respect, since political turmoil in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s stalled initial Metro plans that began construction in 1985 (Yuen 2024). These projects have made some progress in addressing Lima’s transportation needs; Line 2 alone has a beneficiary population of 2.4 million people and will reduce private mobility in the city by 10% (López-Varela and Moreno 2020).
Lima is also addressing congestion and informal transit issues through regulatory reform and enforcement. Ordinance 1613 was passed in 2012 which resulted in the creation of the Lima Metropolitana Integrated Public Transport System (SIT) whose mission is to “reorder the mass transportation network and create an integrated, accessible, efficient, and environmentally friendly system” (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). The SIT is itself overseen by the Urban Transportation Authority (ATU) under the Ministry of Transport (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). The existence of a robust bureaucratic framework is key for expanding and operating the city’s formal transit infrastructure, and for expanding formal transit access to more of Lima’s population. However, SIT services only constituted 8% of city-wide mode-share as of 2020, meaning that the SIT has a long way to go with respect to expanding its services and taking mode share away from lower quality informal transport options and private vehicles (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). While informal transport options remain dominant, the ATU has stepped up enforcement when it comes to restricted lane usage and safety using vehicle inspection cameras throughout the city. With these cameras, “the audiovisual evidence obtained will allow the ATU to effectively sanction transport infractions committed by both regular transport units and unauthorized 'colectivo' vehicles” (CE Noticias Financieras, English Ed. 2024). Enforcement measures such as cameras will help ensure roadway capacity is correctly and optimally allocated, allowing for faster travel times within the city.
In addition to Lima’s current approaches to solving the city’s congestion problem, further planning and governance-related measures should also be employed to ensure success. As mentioned, Lima suffers from a lack of mixed-use development and integrated planning, and steps should be taken to address this deficiency. The integration of spatial planning related to transportation and housing is key, and would contribute to better integration of transit projects into the urban fabric and more utility for those living near transit routes. For example, research conducted in Lima found that “integrated planning of public transport and the open space system could contribute to improve indicators related to urban mobility, environmental quality and social inclusion, in unstructured environments and socially vulnerable communities” (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). By explicitly planning transit routes in conjunction with other aspects of the city (such as open space), residents will be able to get yet more utility out of new transit infrastructure that is constructed. Integrated planning approaches should also favour polycentrism within the city and “reinforce local centralities and make employment available in accessible nodes away from the traditional centers. In this way, travel times around Lima will be more equal” (Jauregui et al. 2024). Other research conducted in Lima calls for an integrated focus on social and political considerations during transit planning, stating that while “technical design issues attract most of the attention in transport planning,” it is worth noting that “social and political dimensions are critical areas during project implementation, and if not considered, they can stop or delay progress and even cause abandonment” (Sallo and Hickman 2021). On the governance side, Lima can take inspiration from the Verkehrsverbund model of regional transit governance in German-speaking areas of Europe; analysis of Lima’s transit network found that such a model “provides a way of managing and coordinating all transit services in a region … Lima might learn from such arrangements in reforming its transit governance” (Jauregui et al. 2024). With a more regional framework for transit planning, services and routes can be better connected while integrated planning itself becomes easier due to the wider scope of transit planning geography being managed by a single entity.
Lima should also seek to further regulate informal transport within the city and focus on transportation modes and projects that will most help to alleviate congestion. Informal transport vehicles themselves should be better regulated to meet safety and environmental standards; the current regulatory regime is characterized by the “unrestricted importation of used vehicles – bearing a highly polluting and uncomfortable fleet” (López-Varela and Moreno 2020). Informal transit should still be an important part of Lima’s transportation network, as it can better address more idiosyncratic and flexible needs such as last mile transportation. Lima can look to places such as Barbados, where informal transport options compete against government-run alternatives and provide unique services of their own, all while under a stronger regulatory regime that sets fares and stronger vehicle standards (Government of Barbados 2020). Last mile transportation can also be addressed with solutions such as bike share; Lima has already launched the first such service in Peru (Inurba Mobility 2022), and further expansion could nicely complement currently ongoing public transit expansion. Lima should also put more focus into public transit expansion rather than highway capacity projects; analysis of the Vı́as Nuevas de Lima highway project in the north of the city revealed that while middle and high income residents who relocated near the expanded highway benefitted from its increased capacity, they often relocated from more central areas, meaning that vehicle distances travelled (and therefore overall city-wide congestion) increased as a result of the project (Yu et al. 2024).
While Lima has begun to build infrastructure and implement policies with the intention of alleviating congestion within the city, such as by expanding their Metro and reforming their transit governance structure, more should be done to continue to tackle the city’s chronic congestion. These measures include an integrated regional planning approach, encouraging polycentrism within the city, strengthened regulation of informal transit, and the de-prioritization of highway projects. With these policies in place, Lima can best address their ongoing congestion problems, which will especially benefit low-income residents who disproportionately bear the negative effects of the city’s congested transportation network.
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This writing was originally submitted as coursework at the University of Toronto. It was only posted online after being fully graded and returned, although the post may be backdated to better reflect when it was actually written.