Ricardo Hurtubia

The Role of Accessibility to Public Transport and Quality of Walking Environment on Urban Equity: The Case of Santiago de Chile

Most studies of public transport accessibility have focused on proximity to stops, walking distances or time to reach them. This approach ignores other accessibility barriers, such as the quality of the urban environment of these walks. The aim of this research is to analyze both accessibility to public transport stops and the quality of the urban walking environment, exploring fairness issues across the city in terms of these two dimensions. The proposed methodology considers the definition of two indicators: walking accessibility to public transport stops and quality of the walking environment, considering different attributes and dimensions. These indicators are later used to develop a fairness analysis at the local and metropolitan level, using Lorenz curves, Gini coefficient, and Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) poverty measures. A diagnosis based on these indicators for Santiago de Chile allows us to suggest public policy priorities to improve accessibility to public transport and promote modal shift. The results show that 12 out of 34 municipalities in Santiago are deprived of one or both dimensions, not managing to achieve minimum fairness standards. Moreover, since a correlation between low income and poor access and urban space quality is detected, urban fairness across the city would benefit from centralized urban policies not depending on the budget of each administrative division.

Vectores de expansión urbana y su interacción con los patrones socioeconómicos existentes en la ciudad de Santiago

In the context of the expansion of the metropolitan area of Santiago without master plans and based on real estate developers who decide the location and type of project to be developed (meeting certain conditions), the segregation of Santiago is reproduced in the new projects in the peri-urban area. The hypothesis of this investigation is that the unit price in a new housing development is explained by its relationship with other existing projects. The relation is measured considering travel times between projects, ranked by price. The results verify that projects seek proximity to the projects of the same type and with the socioeconomic groups to which they are associated. This indicates that while new developments aimed at a certain socioeconomic group can be located in other socioeconomic sectors, they do maintain relationships with their peers.