2.1. Korean Case (Seoul Metropolitan Area)

Seoul is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of South Korea. It is the main city of the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA), which includes the Incheon city and the Gyeonggi province, conforming one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas, with a population exceeding 25 million residents. The SMA is home to over half of South Korea population, 50.72% as of 2014 [¹], with an area about 11,747 km². The largest city is Seoul, with a population of approximately 10 million people, followed by Incheon, with just under 3 million, and the lacking amount of residents belonging to the Gyeonggi province. In relation to the size of the territory, Gyeonggi province has an area of 10,184 km², the city of Incheon, 1,010 km² and Seoul city has an area of only 605.21 km². [¹] (See image 1 in the Chapter 3.1).

The increased concentration of population in the SMA - the average rate reached of 8.4% per year from the 60s - led to the rising of land price in Seoul and spillover to suburbs a middle and low-income class looking for better housing options [²]. The consequences of this continued expansion appeared as the exacerbation of job-housing mismatch, problems of congestion as also spinoff environmental problems [³].

The Central Government assumed a crucial role and function for the metropolitan management with the New Town Development Housing Shortage Mitigation (’89-’95), building five New Towns located within a radius 20 km away from Seoul, and supplying 21.4 million housing units for 1.17 million population [¹, ⁴]. The central government started the metro construction and for 1985 there were 4 lines, totaling 134.9 km. The construction of the metro system accelerated the building of New Towns. After a 2^nd phase (2001) and a 3^rd phase (2012) of constructions, the SMA metro system has now 13 lines totaling 825.2 km [¹, ³, ⁴].

SMA Management strategies changed from a High Speed Urban Land and Housing Development (New Town 1989-95 for Housing Shortage Mitigation) to a New Town development. The New Towns built after 2000s (four other cities) had the characteristics of having less average density, being environmentally friendly and self-sufficient as strategies to decrease the commuting dependency to Seoul. Regarding transportation, these New Towns were planned according to the mass-transit oriented model, connected with vicinity areas and served by a mass transport system in order to enhance the use of public transportation and to generate a functionally connected system that, through the community, offers economic prosperity and quality of life [¹][²]. (See Table 1 in the Chapter 3.1)

Table 1 Comparison between management strategies and transport vision of the Korean and the Colombian case in the governance level 

Central government had always fulfilled a crucial role regarding metropolitan and local level support. The Introduction of the Autonomy to Local Governments in 85’ started a period of decentralized collaboration. In 95, it started also a decentralization about how each administrative level began to participate in the budget of infrastructures and projects that share interests of all levels. Projects of national interest and impact are fully funded by the Central Government, and projects of interest and local impact must be funded by the municipal government [²]. However, when there is a transport system project, with metropolitan or regional interest and impact, the Central Government participates in the budget allocation (80%) by ensuring the coordination, management, and financing of a major item of investment. Once in the operational phase, the local government is totally responsible.

Nowadays, Growth Management Policy for the SMA has characteristics of nationwide spatial policies to remove the disparity between the SMA and other regions [³]. It also has characteristics of region-wide spatial policies for improving quality of life for residents, strengthening the competitiveness and resolving the overcrowding and overpopulation issue.

In 2004 Seoul City underwent a Public Transport Reform, introducing Transit-Oriented Policies. Measures adopted with this reform allowed the creation of an integrated transfer and transit fare system, operated in a semi-public way. In 2005, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was set up by the local government union Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi province. The functions of this entity, among others, are to establish metropolitan public transportation comprehensive plans, consultation and adjustment in transportation policies and to build infrastructure [¹, ²].

With the 2004 Seoul Public Transport Reform measure, responding to the metropolitan strategy of public transport-oriented policies, Seoul Government completely reorganized the transport model system in a semi-public operation system, with an emphasis on the public nature of the bus services for which, up to that time, private providers had operated in a private logic. After the public transport reform, the government moved into a single contract with the labor union of the private transportation companies. This entity already existed before the reform, but went on to play a key role once it started to have a contract with each of the 66 private companies authorized to operate the public bus transport service. This permitted the application of the “single-till” principle, where the government recognized the authority of each bus private company, but the revenues coming from the routes would belong to the public revenue management organization to be distributed to each bus operating company, according to the operation ratio of each route, with a bidding system introduced to control the creation of new routes [⁵]. (See Table 2 and Figure 4 in the Chapter 3.1)

Table 2 Comparison between operational aspects of the Korean and the Colombian case 

This way, Seoul government pays to each company the amount spent in the operation of the system. The smart card system that made possible an integrated fare system and a fare reduction distance-based was installed, and the fare passed to be calculated according to the user’s travelled distance, and not anymore with the number of transfer among transportation modes. This also applied to the fare of inter-city buses, which charged extra fare for traveling additional distances. With the unique fare, private companies suffered a budget shortage, imposing on the government to support them, as they offer a public service. Since then, the government subsidizes the profit deficit using capital provided by taxes. Investment costs in the transportation service offered by private companies are also provided by the government. These measures increased the profit deficit for the government, but represent the welfare policies, maintaining the fare in an affordable level and offering discounts or subsidies to socially vulnerable citizen groups such as children, elderly adults and low-income people [⁵].

Based on an annual evaluation of the service offered (there are requirements that the companies must meet such as: good and safely service and respect for frequencies, among others), the government defines the amount of the grant that each company will receive. With this amount, they can encourage companies to maintain a standard of quality and safety in their service. The continuing negative reoccurrence in the evaluation system by a company generates warnings that can lead the company to have its contract cancelled by the government.

With the reform, changes occurred not only in the financial system but also in the operational aspects of the metropolitan area transport system. The already existing private transport companies had to adapt to the new system model, but now being funded by the government to offer a public service of quality and efficient. Before that time, “the quality of bus service was very poor because of old vehicles and related facilities, which caused a further decrease in the share of buses in all transport system” [⁵].

Private companies already had their fleet of buses and their parking lots, as well as their routes in which they were operating before 2004, and the government recognized and accepted their authority to respond to the service. Government will interfere in the operation just when a company is not able to respond to the demand in a route (for example, metropolitan government is running night buses). It is a government function to decide on the minimum frequency time and about extending some routes, or restructuring some tracts of the routs.

With the application of the single-till model, the government redistributes to each bus operating company its operating costs, such as the fuel used according to the operation ratio of each route (traveled kilometers), the drivers’ wages, insurance costs, etc.

The adoption of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)-based Transport System Management allowed the Seoul Metropolitan Government to have all data information about the transport system, from the financial aspects to the operational ones (real-time bus information, route and transfer information, etc.). With the smart card (T-money as it is called in the SMA) the transport system does not use money anymore, and this made possible the application of the integrated fare system as well as fare reduction. With a board device installed in every bus and in metro stations (and even in taxis - but, in this case, there is a separate fare for the use of a taxi), users have to validate their smart card at the entrance and exit of each transport mode for the system to calculate the total distance made by each user to apply for the respective fare. The Integrated Traffic Management also allows a better control and planning of the system.

There were conflicts in the beginning, private companies did not accept the reform proposal initially, and the government had to organize a social movement with mayors, NGOs and important people to convince companies that they should begin to share their profits.

Despite many efforts from central government, the decentralization undertaken by the government has some limitations due to the top-down and regulation-based approach by the central government. Local governments present a semi-autonomous condition yet. The limited roles, functions and budgets of local governments, plus a lack of professionals, can generate an ineffective governance with not too much citizen participation. The issues of overpopulation and also an excessive concentration of core functions continue. Among the causes that can explain concentration in the SMA is the political factor [⁵].

2.2. Colombian Case (Aburrá Valley Metropolitan Area)

The Aburrá Valley is a subregion of Antioquia department located in the Andes Region. It is a natural basin of Medellin River that has from its north limit to its southern part 60 km long, while presents several varieties in its width, being the widest part 8 to 10 km (the one that corresponds to the municipality of Medellin) and the narrowest part with 3 km (corresponds to the municipality of Copacabana). The Aburrá Valley is a densely populated region (3,202 inhabitants per square kilometer in 2014) with predominantly urban characteristics, housing the largest population of the department (about 58.5%) [⁶]. The AMVA is the main pole of development, concentrating a dynamic conurbation which constitutes the second largest urban conglomeration of Colombia, with a population exceeding 3.8 million people, according to the population projection for 2016 elaborated by DANE form the Census of 2005 [⁷]. The AVMA is constituted by ten municipalities: Medellin, Bello, Barbosa, Copacabana, La Estrella, Girardota, Itagui, Caldas, Sabaneta, and Envigado.

Medellin is the capital of the department of Antioquia, the largest city in the country after Bogotá and also the main city of the Metropolitan Area, as well as the largest city of the valley, with a population of approximately 2.5 million people [⁷], with an area of about 380.64 km². The city represents 33% of the Aburrá Valley total area and 0.6% of the total area of Antioquia department. About 27.1% of the total area of the city is urban land, about 1.1% is urban expansion land and the other 71.8% is rural land [⁸] (See Figure 1 in the Chapter 3.1).

Figure 1 Comparison between SMA and AVMA boundaries, areas and population 

The AVMA was the first metropolitan area created in the country in 1980. The metropolitan areas in the country perform the function of planning and development of metropolitan works; some of them, including the AVMA, perform authority in Metropolitan Transport, but the AVMA is the only one that also acts as an Environmental Authority.

According to what is stipulated in the National Constitution and the laws that govern it, the AVMA has the following functions: planning the territory under its jurisdiction; be environmental authority in the urban area of the constituent municipalities; be authority in massive and metropolitan transport; and execute works of metropolitan interest. However, the AVMA currently does not exercise function of biding control and management of land use in municipalities, as this function is performed by each municipal authority in an independently way and, in many cases, without taking into inconsideration metropolitan guidelines.

This situation arises from the Colombian Constitution of 1991 which allows the creation of metropolitan areas as administrative bodies and from the Territorial Management Law 388, 1997, in which metropolitan areas are defined as associative entities while municipalities are defined as territorial entities, with different characteristics, and therefore, also particular functions. Consequently, the AVMA can only guide the municipalities to follow guidelines of urban actions, but cannot intervene in a mandatory manner.

Within the municipalities of the AVMA, Medellin participates as the main city, not only for being the capital of the Department and the largest city, but also because it provides most of the overall budget that accounts for the entity and its projects. This makes a lot of sense considering that it is the municipality with more inhabitants, services and transport compared to other municipalities in the area. Medellin acts, in a certain way, as a subsidiary of other municipalities with lower incomes, ensuring that the metropolitan entity exercises a balancing function among participating municipalities.

Municipalities constituting the AVMA were formed in an independent way, and their growth was unplanned. Densification occurred in a vertiginous way since the early 60s, responding to particular country's social phenomena, including one very marked, the displacement of people from their home areas due to the presence of armed groups outside law and the permanent confrontations in which civilians have been involved. This situation led millions of people to take refuge in major urban centers and in Medellin, particularly, considering its topographical features, the concentration of migrant population situated mainly on the hillsides, as they constitute the periphery zone of the city, generating an occupation in high-risk areas [⁹].

This situation of rapid growth exceeded all possibility for local planning. The foreseen urban zone borders were overstepped, and the planning cycle “changed direction” (the government began a process to formalize informal settlements). This growth generated a process of conurbation throughout the Aburrá Valley, and according to this lack of metropolitan planning, it is possible to notice the differences among building policies of each municipality, with very marked discordance across borders.

With the Law 388, 1997, which created guidelines for municipalities regarding the formulation of the Plans for Territorial Planning (POT in Spanish), local governments had a period to diagnose their territories and create a plan for twelve years. This resulted in the first Medellin’s POT in 2000 which focused on the subjects of housing and public space, but in which transport as a structural axis in the territorial organization has not been included yet in in a precise way. Despite this omission, Medellín and the Aburrá Valley, since that time, has the only metro system in the country that began operating its first line in 1995, serving today, directly or indirectly (by feeding routes), all municipalities in the Metropolitan area. In the first revision made to the Medellin’s POT in 2006, the METRO System (metro system) was defined as the transport structural axis of the city. In this same review, it was recognized that Medellin had a diffuse growth and the Compact City model was proposed [¹⁰]. In 2014, with the Agreement 48, a new revision is made, formulating the current POT of Medellin, and the idea of a more inclusive city with pedestrians and cyclists is complemented to the model of Compact City by reversing the pyramid of transport, in which the pedestrian is now in the first place, and private vehicles are in the last one [¹¹].

The Organic Law of Territorial Planning 1454, 2011 came to complement, with 20 years late (Ministerio del Interior y de Justicia, 2011), Law 388, 1997 creating the normative figure of the Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Territorial Planning (Pemot in Spanish) that articulates local Plans for Territorial Planning and defines the regional conurbation occupation model. The AVMA is the first metropolitan area among those in Colombia to present the Pemot that shall take effect from 2017 on [¹²].

In parallel to review processes of the POT, plans oriented to the planning of the transport system have also been made. In 1986 the first Metropolitan Road Plan of the AVMA was presented. Law 105, 1993 establishes that metropolitan areas must develop transportation master plans in the territories under their jurisdiction. In 2005 the formulation of the Mobility Master Plan for the Aburrá Valley Metropolitan Region (MMPAV) began, proposing innovative initiatives integrating the proposals that were already being discussed in the Medellin’s POT with the Compact City model best defined, in the "Proyecto Metropoli 2002-2020"[¹³], and the Guidelines for Aburrá Valley Metropolitan Area Territorial Planning, among other documents, to support metropolitan management area over the next 15 years in the planning of various means of transport and public space associated [¹⁴] (See in Table 1 in the Chapter 3.1).

The Colombian Government has planned the decentralized model since its Constitution of 1991, proposed through a strong autonomy of its regions, departments, districts and municipalities. This autonomy also refers to the budget formation of each of its levels, regulated by Law 1454, 2011 and Law 1625, 2013, which also regulated the participatory character of the budget when the different levels are working in a same project.

Projects of national interest are funded by the central government, as well as every level of governance finances projects that have interest and impact covering their boundaries and administrative scale. On the other hand, there are national programs where the central level invests in departments and/or municipalities, mainly supporting those that present fewer economic resources and possibilities for developing their own projects due to lack of funds. The three levels (national, departmental and local) are overlapped or complemented by each other in many cases.

The AVMA has its own budget, which comes from a series of sources that are explained in the Law 1625, 2013. This law mentions budgetary allocations from the central and the department levels, but in reality only the municipalities of the Metropolitan Area contribute to the budget formation, being the contribution proportional to the population they represented.

In 2015 Law 1753, National Development Plan 2014-2018 “All for a new Country,” which is the government plan of the current president, was issued. In Art. 31 of the abovementioned law, Financing of Transport System states that transport system must be sustainable, and in order to make it possible, fares charged for a passenger public transport service provision should be sufficient to cover all costs of operation, administration, maintenance, and replacement of equipment. Territorial entities can be financing sources of fare, but in any case the National Government may not make transfers to cover these costs. The exception is in cases of co-financing of metro system or passenger intercity rail transport, in their physical infrastructure pre-operational stage and partial or total initial acquisition of rolling stock.

In Colombia, the government granted the collective public transport service to private transportation companies through tender, which selects and enables companies to the provision of public transport service. The metropolitan and local levels have an individual contractual relationship with each of the 61 private companies that offer the service in the metropolitan area [¹⁵].

The funding model of the collective public transport service for the AVMA, and for Colombia in general, operates in a 100% private way. Municipalities belonging to the AVMA contribute to the infrastructure; however, the responsibility for investing and operating costs (the purchase of new vehicles, the maintenance of the existing fleet, operating and administrative expenses, etc.) fully correspond to service operator companies, which, in turn, pass on such costs to users through the service fare.

The AVMA, as a transport authority, defines the fare of the entire metropolitan area, both metropolitan routes as intra-urban routes. The calculation of the fare is set by a methodology of the Ministry of Transport (Resolution 4350, 1998 and its amendment 392, 1999), where all the costs assumed by a vehicle (capital costs, fixed costs, administrative costs and operating costs) per day are added and this value is divided by the average number of passengers at a vehicle in the same period. The ratio of these values defines how much each passenger has to pay to cover those costs. The average fare is fixed by municipal ordinance and annually adjusted based on the updating of the studies.

The Colombian law establishes that each municipality may determine subsidies for social groups to have access to reduced fares on public transport. The only fare reduction that works at the time, for the collective public transport in the AVMA, is the subsidy for students, which subsidizes about 50% of the ticket amount, value assumed by the Medellin City Hall.

There is no integrated fare in the AVMA collective public transport system, and users of this system must pay a new fare for each transfer, increasing the percentage of the budget allocated for transport. One of the reasons why it happens is because there is not a smart-card payment system; private transport companies manage the fare collection in cash only. The conditions change in the metro system, as in this system there is a single-collection system, which allows users to transfer into some of modes offered, such as the metro and cable lines, and with a surcharge can access modes operated by the same METRO company, as the integrated routes Metroplús (BRT) and feeding routes. The integration of these modes is called SITVA (Integrated transport system of the Valley of the Aburrá in Spanish).

Since there is no “single-till” principle, the resources go directly to each of the companies providing the service, which in its turn pays taxes to the government, both to national and local levels, but not to the AVMA. The only tax that the metropolitan entity directly charges is the environmental fee, the other resources enter through the contributions of municipalities, as noted above.

When a company generates little profit or begins to present an economic deficit, what it does is to reduce its costs leading to a deterioration in the quality of the service, because it starts to spend less in the buses maintenance, works with older buses, and even pays less to its drivers (yet driver wages are part of the operating costs that enter in the calculation of the fare). It might happen that, although a company officially declares a payment of a minimum wage to its drivers, it actually pays a percentage of the amount collected at the end of the day. This creates an incentive for drivers to pick up more passengers, resulting in a wait longer until the bus is full before continuing its route, or creating a competition among drivers that share similar routes and with drivers of the same route. This is a traffic infraction and the driver can be fined. Operating companies do not pay fines and subpoenas, the driver must be responsible for them. Usually, a driver works from 4 am to 10 pm.

Currently, AVMA is being working on raising awareness in relation to this issue with transport companies, with still very incipient results. There are examples of the application of the single-till model for buses in the same route of a same company, and the application of the single-till model for all routes of a same company. Companies that already agreed to participate are finding advantages in the model.

The scheme under which the collective public transport in the city of Medellín was provided, for more than fifty years, and whose model has been followed in the neighboring municipalities, presented very few modifications until today in its administrative, financial, and operating structure [¹⁵].

At present, the public transport in the AVMA is composed by individual public transport (taxis), mass transport, and collective public transport (TPC in Spanish). The collective public transport service differs from the mass public transport service provided by the METRO Company, as previously mentioned, in which belong the metro service, the cable car system, the BRT bus - know in the AVMA as Metroplús, and the feeding routes, under the figure of the collective public transport, SITVA. In this sense, buses that provide the feeding routes service to the metro system make part of a fleet that in the past provided collective public service and currently are being reused as a matter of oversupply at that moment. These vehicles are not part of the fleet considered TPC because the METRO Company operates them differently.

The TPC intra-city routes are under the control of Medellín Mobility Secretariat. Additionally, there are metropolitan routes, which are routes that serve more than one municipality belonging to the metropolitan area, and which reach the Medellín downtown (See Figure 2 in Chapter 3.1). Indeed, in the other municipalities in the metropolitan area, all of the routes that serve the urban center offer a metropolitan service. This occurs because of the low demand to generate local routes in these municipalities. The AVMA and the Mobility Secretariat of each municipality are the responsible for regulating the number of routes and frequency compliance by the operator companies.

Figure 2 Comparison between SMA and AVMA data about numbers of operating companies, routes and buses. (p.m.i.): per million inhabitants. [¹]: It is not being considered in the data feeder routes, operating under the administration of the Company METRO 

As the payment of the public transport system is made only by cash, since there is no smart card payment system, the current system does not allow a single integrated transport fare, and, as previously mentioned, this generates the charging of a new fare in each user transfer. In order to make effective the subsidy to students, nowadays the only subsidy in force in the AVMA, to subsidized students are given tickets that correspond to the value of the subsidy. The control of this distribution is a responsibility of educational institutions, when have to list the students, verify that they meet the requirements, quantify the number of trips that each student makes, and make the distribution of tickets. The ultimate responsibility for ensuring the student’s subsidy is the Secretariat of Education and, ultimately, the educational institution.

In addition, provided the absence of a smart card and an integrated technology system for the TPC management, it is very difficult for the government to collect system data, relating to users such as origins, destinations, transfer, time travel, etc., or data concerning the services provided by the operating companies such as information related to operating costs, for example. It leads to a difficulty in having updated data and could use it for purposes of transport system planning.

The corporate scheme of private companies operating the TPC system functions according to the “affiliator” model: companies are usually owners of a very small number of vehicles (number that is less than 5%), and in order to comply with the vehicular offer to meet the assigned demand, companies enroll, for their operation, vehicles owned by individuals. Transport companies have parking lots for their fleet, but many individual owners leave their vehicles parked in public spaces. Each bus owner pays the affiliation of his vehicle to the company to operate the bus (in addition to paying taxes that any vehicle owner must pay to the government). This kind of connection allows companies to exempt themselves from some operational and administrative activities, transferring to the owner the responsibility of the maintenance or renewal of the vehicle [¹⁴].

The owners, in turn, directly hire the number of drivers they need, according to the number of buses in their possession and, in some cases, less frequent, the same bus owners also drive their buses themselves. As mentioned previously, it often happens that the bus owner declares to the social insurance and the Secretariat of Transport to be paying to the drivers at least a minimum wage, but, in practice, it is known that some drivers are paid proportionally according to what they collect in tickets at the end of a working day. This situation leads to the driver looks for filling the bus with too many passengers, and disrespect the stipulated frequency, as well as creates a competition among drivers of different routes (or even of the same route) as to the number of passengers. This is what have been called the “Cent War”.

The previous situation configures a business in which authorized companies do not perform the management operation, but the responsibility is transferred to the owner of the affiliated vehicles, only spending a minimum of management through the dispatchers and clock controllers at some points of the route. This implies that the incomes of the transport companies are not product, mostly, of the transport operation management, but of the vehicles affiliation and an affiliates’ representation with the authorities [¹⁵]. (See Figure 4 in Chapter 3.1)

Figure 3 Comparison between SMA and AVMA data about numbers of daily trips; trips/pax/day and ridership. Trips/pax/day and daily trips for Medellín was not informed 

Figure 4 Comparison between SMA and AVMA organizational, financial and operational model 

Considering that, the transport operation by each company is a sum of individual vehicles, even though there are four general categories of buses related to the number of passengers it can carry (bus standard, bus, minibus and microbus); variations of vehicles providing the service in terms of models, sizes, and colors are immense. Even the communicative elements of the bus route are presented differently in each vehicle.

The government should apply sanctions when a company providing the service violates the norms. By adding three penalties in the same year, a company can have its license suspended; two suspensions in three years can lead to cancellation. The cancellation of the license to operate may also happen when, among other cases, it is proved that the operating, technical, security or financial conditions were not restored within a period granted to the company.

According to the Medellín Mobility Secretariat, in its Executive Report Project TPMedellín 2015, the positive aspects of the current collective bus system of the city are: a great coverage; good frequencies; the possibility of direct travels without transfer; the acceptable travel times (commercial speed closed to 13 km/h in peak period); the democratization of ownership of the buses, and the tradition of the routes in the city neighborhoods.

Also according to the Medellín Mobility Secretariat, in the same report, several aspects of the current system are identified to improve: the corporate scheme with deficiencies in the operating planning and the maintenance; the lack of signaled bus stops, appropriate spacing and sizing; the saturation in city downtown that decreases the commercial speed and pollutes; the difficulty to insert exclusive lane corridors for lack of road space in some areas; the difficulty to operate exclusive lane corridors with the quantity of current buses; the lack of a collection system that allows the finance sector to modernize, and the lack of logistics centers or parking lots without public space invasion.

3.1. Comparison and Implications

In Colombia, the decentralized structure that empowered local government with authority to legislate presents limitations in fully implemented national laws, plans and projects. In addition, there is a lack of coordination and integration among different administrative levels in a vertical way as also in a horizontal way (among different entities in a same hierarchy), related to the normative (policies, strategies, and measures), financing and management aspects. This generates also lack of coherence among existing instruments for the governance of the territory, lacking, as well, regional and departmental level instruments.

Nowadays, there are not implemented hierarchical systems of regional, metropolitan and urban mobility [¹⁴]. Furthermore, there are not yet clear policies about how to enable a polycentric network of urban nodes. According to the AVMA, the dynamic of expansion of uses and activities centered in the Aburrá Valley advances faster than the metropolitan, sub regional and municipal planning instruments, which would allow ordering and regulating it [¹⁴]. According to the AVMA and to DANE projection data, 58.5% of the population of the department of Antioquia is located in 1.8% of the territory. In relation to the Metropolitan Area of ​​the Valley of Aburrá, 95% of the 3,821 million inhabitants live in urban land of the 10 municipalities. The data lead us to conclude that despite the difference in size between both metropolitan areas, both SMA and AVMA present high population densities. If we consider the urban population density indicator, Medellin is even denser than Seoul, with 23,465 pop / km², while Seoul has 17,254 pop / km².

The metropolitan area, in its associative entity condition, does not exercise authority function on land use. For this reason, it can only guide, through directives, the territorial management in its urban actions, and those limitations also cause a negatively impact on mobility and transport integration policies with public space. The Mobility Master Plan (MMPAV) seeks to respond to a comprehensive planning for mobility and transport. However, it is an “advisor” document in making decisions to institutions related with mobility and territorial space.

The budget formation of metropolitan areas in Colombia follows a bottom-up policy of fiscal decentralization, imposing on municipalities in the metropolitan area to contribute to the budget. This creates a conflict among the different municipalities, which with their budgets, many times limited, have to contribute to the metropolitan area and expect that the projects in general, and particularly in the transport system, obey to an equity and a regional balance policy. All urban routes of Medellin, besides metropolitan routes, generate an oversupply in downtown, as all routes come there, creating problems of congestion and environmental problems of pollution caused by the average age of the fleet and the fuel used.

Although the National Government, by requiring a self-sustainable collective public transport system, enables territorial entities to participate in part of this funding, it has not been established to what extent, and therefore they do not participate. It ultimately leads to transportation companies to pay for all the provision costs of a public service that is of public order but works in a 100% private way. At the same time, local governments fail in their binding character, and the legislation itself creates gaps or inconsistences that are used by operating companies in negotiations with the government, which finds itself limited in the imposition of regulation compliance. The operating companies apply the private market rules to the provision of this public service. As there is a fixed amount for the fare, each company looks for increasing its own profit by diminishing the quality of the service.

The same regulation allows a transport company to affiliate private vehicles, requiring a very small own fleet. From this, each vehicle owner represents an individual interest in the system, making it difficult to build consensus towards an organized transport system. As the government transfers the investment and operational costs to the companies, they - in their turn - do the same, transferring the costs to bus owners. It becomes difficult to concentrate investment in collective infrastructure, as bus deposits, for example. Being these vehicles owned by third parties, in some cases, at the end of a work day, their owners park them in front of their houses, obstructing the public space.

The license cancellation of an operating company is a bureaucratic process and presents a significant problem for local governments, as this cancellation would imply that the routes in charge would remain unserved, and the government does not have the capacity to supply them. On the other hand, there is no incentive system for companies meeting, standards of quality, efficiency, comfort and accessibility of the service.

There is a functional disarticulation of competencies and of management of the various modes of transport in the Aburrá Valley: the metro system; the standard bus, the bus, the minibus and the microbus system; and the taxi system [¹⁴]. The results of this lack of articulation are reflected in the lack of coordination among the different operators of the various modes of transport, making the implementation of a single fare and an integrated smart card system impossible.

The lack of an integrated system and the lack of a smart card do not allow, in addition to the integrated fare, a data collection that accurately represent the current state of the collective public transport system. The mobility secretariat has to collect data of the number of passengers transported based on the information contained in the passenger counting of each bus. There is no information of an average travel time of passengers, and the possibility to verify the existing supply and demand capacity for each route is obtained only through studies carried out for this purpose.

Each trip is a fare paid by the passenger. For a person who earns a minimum monthly wage, who lives and works in Medellin, taking a bus to go/return to their job, transport costs may account for 12% of their budget; if this person had to take two buses to go/return from work, these costs would be around 23%. For a person who lives in the metropolitan area and works in Medellin or vice versa, their transportation expenses may account for 20% of their income, without the need for transfer, and 31.5% if it is necessary to take two buses to go to work and other two buses to come back home [¹⁶].

Due to lack of public funding, the only existing subsidy is the one to the student group. It is made in a crossed way, which means that the user that pays the full fare is funding the subsidized fare.

The existing low wage levels in Colombia must be considered, and specifically in the AVMA, in Medellin 12.62% of the population live in dwellings of socioeconomic stratum 1; 37.03% in the socioeconomic stratum 2; 29.64% live in the stratum 3; 9.96% in stratum 4; 6.82% in stratum 5; and 3.93% in stratum 6. Socioeconomic dwelling strata (applies to the entire country) has the following categories: 1. Under low; 2. Low; 3. Medium low; 4. Medium; 5, Medium high; 6. High. Of these, strata 1, 2 and 3 correspond to the lower strata that hold users with fewer resources, which are beneficiaries of subsidies on public services; strata 5 and 6 correspond to upper strata that hold users with greater economic resources, which must pay surcharges (contribution) on the amount of public services. The stratum 4 is not beneficiary of subsidies, neither has to pay surcharges, it pays exactly the amount that the company defines as the provided service cost. In Colombia, the methodology of stratification based on the characteristics of the dwelling and its urban or rural surrounding has been adopted because, according DANE, income per person and dwelling data are unmanageable by the volume of data that government would have to collect, because of its variability in the short term. Also it does not constitute reliable information due to the magnitude of the informality and the continuous displacement of families and, fundamentally, because the rules concerning the stratification ordered that residential properties should be stratified, and not households (Law 142, article 101.1), among other reasons [¹⁷].

If the low wage levels data in the AVMA are crossed with the modal share (there is no published data of modal share by socioeconomic stratum), we can deduce that the percentage of trips made by public transport (37%) largely corresponds to trips made by lower strata of the population. So the costs of the reduced fare are charged to all users of the system, which, in turn, are using the collective public transport system because, generally, their economic conditions do not allow them to travel otherwise.

Figure 5 Modal split in SMA (2010) and in AVMA (2012) 

Under the current “affiliator model”, the payment distribution is not made from a managing body to employees, but conversely. The management of costs and profits is individual, losing the possibility to manage an economy of scale. The application of the current model, combined with the lack of institutional control, allows the generation of undignified working conditions within the system, such as payments lower than the minimum wage and extended work hours.

3.2. Guidelines

The guidelines are presented according to the possibility of their implementation in the short, middle, and long term; likewise, they will be presented following the three levels of Governance Level, Financial System, and Operational Aspects. The decision to study the different levels separately aims to facilitate the analysis and present them in a didactic way, following the hierarchical order established in planning process. That does not mean that there is no relationship among all levels, and that decisions mad at the strategic level do not impact the operational one directly. These interrelations are taken into account in the conclusions presented.

Governance Level - Short term

Middle term

Long term

Financial System - Short term

Middle term

Long term

Operational Aspects - Short term

Middle term