“Free bus rides for women are admirable; building more overpasses is a crime”

How do Bengaluru and Bogota compare? How can these cities grow sustainably and inclusively?

Both Bogota and Bengaluru are cities of the Global South. We face similar challenges, opportunities and hopes to achieve socially inclusive and sustainable economic growth and strengthen democracy.

Bogota is a city of 8 million people and the larger metropolitan area has 12 million people. Bogota alone generates 25% of Colombia's GDP. I believe Bangalore has similar numbers.

To achieve inclusive and sustainable development, we need to integrate both rural and urban development. We need to coordinate with the people and elected representatives of the regions that provide water, energy and food for urban regions.

It is important to decarbonise the economy, and we need to do so by decarbonising public transport. Multimodal, connected transport based on clean energy and inclusive spaces for people is an important part of the response to the challenges of climate change and the urban productivity challenge.

Both Bogota and Bengaluru are known for their traffic problems. We are facing the same challenge: as people gain more economic participation and income, more of them want to own a car. For them, it is not even an economic hope, it is a cultural hope. They see a car not just as a means of transportation, but as a status symbol, a cultural status of modernization. This is still deeply ingrained in our minds, even though it has nothing to do with real development.

The byproduct of this has been incredibly unsustainable, polluted urban development in the United States. If the rest of the world follows the same urbanization that the United States has, we will simply destroy this planet in a matter of years.

The technical solution is to build a multimodal, clean, fast and affordable public transport system. You may need metro lines, but you also need a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, hopefully electric. You also need priority lanes for feeder buses, hopefully also electric. You also need regional trains that better connect the entire region around the city. Bengaluru is the perfect city for more bikes and dedicated lanes for them.

The city is also the Silicon Valley of India. What Bengaluru and India need is data on how people move around, why everyone chooses a particular mode of transport, where each trip comes from, where it goes, where it ends, what it costs, when it takes, etc. Bangalore's tech industry should provide this information to the state for free, that is the minimum contribution it can make.

With this information, you can plan and build the most effective multimodal system, which can then help you with your land use planning.

We should never forget that we share the planet with other living beings. They are just as important to the preservation of our planet as we are. They do not need subways or buses, but ecosystem connections within the city.

In your opinion, what is the importance of social and gender inclusion in development?

In India, many people still live in poverty. In Colombia, a third of the population is poor. That is why social inclusion is very important in development.

Let's take the example of the “care system” in Colombia. Women in particular are lagging behind in economic development. One of the reasons women are lagging behind is because we are more time-poor than men all over the world. In Bogota, women work seven hours more per day, but it is unpaid care work. The care economy represents 13% of Bogota's GDP and 20% of Colombia's GDP, but it is unpaid care work, 90% of which is done by women and 10% by men. So it is not surprising that these men and women live in poverty. And they cannot work in other sectors.

To solve this problem, we used the existing social infrastructure such as schools, health centers, community centers, recreational and cultural facilities. We used these facilities near the homes of these unpaid caregivers to get closer to them and hired some social workers there, so we could provide three types of services.

First of all, it is about taking care of the people who also care for women – children, the elderly, relatives with disabilities – and thus giving women more time.

In the same places, we have created spaces and services where women can spend their free time, take advantage of work opportunities and gain organizational opportunities for social empowerment.

The third service is to teach all other family members how to care.

What do you think about building more overpasses to solve the city's traffic problems?

The problem is not that people own cars. But if people plan to drive their own cars to work during rush hours, we will definitely have congestion no matter how much infrastructure we build. If you build flyovers and say you don't have enough surface space, there will be congestion for the next ten years, period.

We need to create incentives and teach people to use the car only for occasional or urgent trips, and not for their daily commute. For the latter, they should use the subway, rapid transit, shuttle buses, bicycles and other forms of public transport.

This is not a war on cars. It is a shared commitment to use multimodal transport for different types of journeys. We need to move from the typical car-filled streets of the 20th century to the green corridors of the 21st century.

In Bogota, 80% of people do not own a car. Only 15 to 17% of trips in Bogota are made by private car. About 50% of trips are made by public transport. About 8% are made by bicycle and 24% of trips are made on foot. But at least 70% of public space for mobility is reserved for cars. For almost all other means of transport, this is unfair.

People who use cars during rush hour must feel the pressure of space and price. We could follow Santiago's example and charge them tolls. Otherwise they will not be deterred.

Better public transit means more trips without congestion. Better car infrastructure means more trips with more congestion. That's the difference. Given the amount of experience, data and lessons we have gained from 150 years of urbanization, building more overpasses in the 21st century is a crime.

What lessons can both cities learn from each other?

Not only Bengaluru, but other Indian cities currently have much more gender-equitable public transport than Bogota. There are exclusive train carriages for women, free bus rides for women and so on. Public transport in India is cheaper by far, which is fair for people in general and especially for women who live in deep poverty. We are trying to learn from you and incorporate that into our systems.

What probably makes us much better is the development of walkable spaces. Here, walking on the sidewalks or trying to cross the streets is an adventure. I'm not saying Bogotá is the best city, but our walkable spaces, sidewalks and bike lanes are safer, better designed, inclusive and widely used.