Tram-City

One of the important issues nowadays in cities refers to public transport, why?As our population is growing and concentrating in urban areas, there is a need for creating different ways of transport in order to ensure the mobility of all (or at least the majority) of the inhabitants.

In the aim of building sustainable cities, public transport plays a very important role. As it is widely known, efficient public transportation reduces air pollution, due to reduction of vehicles in the streets (less greenhouse gases emissions). This will result in improving the air quality. There will also be other benefits, like alleviating traffic congestion, noise,and increase productivity of labor by reducing travel time, as well. That’s why authorities wish to incorporate to the city transport network, ways of transport that suits this requirements. Trams (also called streetcar or trolley) show to be a good alternative for that. Compared to buses, trams are faster, more reliable, frequent, and have a higher capacity .

In this context, this week was held in Barcelona, Spain, the International Tram-City Conference, which objective is to discuss about trams, their potential and future, taking in consideration that there is a kind of public transport system revolution in many cities of the world where trams are returning to the streets.

There are many examples, but i would like to talk about what is happening in my home country, Chile. Santiago, it’s capital city, is a huge metropolitan area with almost 7 million inhabitants. As the city was built between the mountains, and the automotive park is large (4.121.355 units), we suffer from severe air pollution, specially during the winter season when there is a combination of low temperatures and low air ventilation.Data measured in year 2014 for ambient air pollution in Santiago gave the following result: 64 for PM10 and 19 for PM2.5 (Word Health Organization Global urban ambient air pollution database). Health safety values accepted by the WHO for this parameters are 20 and 10, respectively. Ten years ago, it was implemented a new transport system based on the Colombian “Transmilenio” which worked well to that South American country, but not for ours. Problems of design and operation of this transport system are still unsolved in Santiago. That’s why, the municipality of Las Condes, will build the first tramway line in the country in the next years. Authorities expect this to become an example to other municipalities as a way of improving public transport in the city. We will have to wait until it starts operating to see if it accomplishes this goal.