Abstract
Politicians, consultants and engineers develop public transportation systems using a variety of well-developed and established modeling tools to calculate different aspects of a system. Some of them are performance-capacity against investment models to determine the value of a given technical choice. Others are economic models to calculate the feasibility of the system, the distributed benefits across population groups and the possibility of providing improved access to special users. These models are regarded as “rational” and thus morally neutral. However, recent research has demonstrated that the implicit assumptions and even the specific ways of estimating different constants to value input data in these models shape the results in ways that perpetuate social injustices built in the urban landscape of our cities. This chapter analyses the case of the design of Transmilenio in Bogotá, a public mass transportation system coined as one of the most progressive on the planet. Part of a political discourse to improve social justice in Bogotá, the project is successful in many respects but falls short of the original aims in many other respects. The chapter describes how the “rational modeling” brought in at various stages in the process hides social injustices under the veil of neutrality. This chapter, thus, calls to engineers to become critically aware of how they can influence systems modeling in ways that are more socially just.
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Notes
- 1.
This account of the political discourse is based on interviews by the author with Enrique Peñalosa conducted the 15th of October of 2005, with Ignacio de Guzmán conducted the 10th of March of 2009 and with Germán Lleras conducted the 10th of February of 2010. All the interviews took place in Bogotá.
- 2.
- 3.
In Colombia and many other countries there is a high concentration of property in some services. For instance, mobile telephony in Colombia was owned at the time by only two companies and a one minute call was as expensive as a single ride in public transportation.
- 4.
The price for using Transmilenio is not decided politically in the city council, like it was with the TCP. It is now determined by a formula (a model) that takes into account the costs of operation of the system. Therefore, it the operation costs increase, so the price of the ride. Therefore, it can be said that the economic model of Transmilenio was designed in such a way that most of the economic risk of the system is handed down to the passenger.
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Pineda, A.F.V. (2013). What Can Engineering Systems Teach Us About Social (In)Justices? The Case of Public Transportation Systems. In: Lucena, J. (eds) Engineering Education for Social Justice. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6350-0_10
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