“Pedestrian priority” in Buenos Aires

I spent a week in Buenos Aires last month. This was my fourth (and longest) trip to the city. I had been there previously in 1986, 2002, and 2015. In the course of my recent trip, I tried to learn everything I could about the self-conscious efforts that have been made in recent years to improve conditions for pedestrians and transit users in the city.

A little background is (as always) in order.¹

Buenos Aires was a poor and tiny place until late in the 19th century. Much of what is now Argentina was not controlled by the state until well into the century, and the city’s small hinterland contained no silver and was too far south to grow sugar.

Things changed radically in the last two decades of the 19th century when Argentina became a major exporter of wheat and beef (the latter required refrigeration that wasn’t available until the 1880s). By the time of World War I, Argentina had become one of the world’s richest countries, and it attracted immigrants (mostly from Italy and Spain) on a very large scale. The Buenos Aires urban area was, by one count, the world’s 12th largest in 1914, with a population of 1,630,000. In 1925, with 2,410,000 people, it ranked 8th, and it continued to grow rapidly through the 1920s and beyond.²

The fact that Buenos Aires became so big before World War I meant that its early growth took place before the era when the automobile could have a significant effect on urban morphology. Thus, as is true of the other big cities of its era, its core was built up to an extremely high level of density, and its most prosperous inhabitants worked out ways to live comfortably despite the crowding. That core is still there. It could be said to include most of the area now encompassed by the autonomous city of Buenos Aires (roughly the area served by the Subte [subway] on the accompanying maps, below), but the densest and most distinctive parts of the city are the areas within four or five kilometers of the city center, and especially the northern, more prosperous half of this zone. These were the areas that filled in during Buenos Aires’ late 19th-/early 20th-century decades of great prosperity. This is the part of Buenos Aires that gave rise to its being called the “Paris of South America.” Both public buildings and the housing of the well-to-do were built in an elaborate late 19th-century style well into the 20th century. Many of these buildings remain, and they give central Buenos Aires and neighborhoods like Retiro, Recoleta (Barrio Norte), and Palermo a distinctive architectural character different than that of any other place on earth. South and west of these central neighborhoods are middle-class quarters like Abasto and Belgrano where the older buildings are less opulent but otherwise not so different from those in the core wealthy neighborhoods. The southern parts of the city of Buenos Aires are with certain exceptions where poorer people live. These areas too mostly filled in at high density early in the 20th century. The older buildings in these neighborhoods were (as one might expect) plainer and less distinctive than those in the northern quarters.

It could be said that in some ways daily life in the central and northern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires hasn’t changed enormously for the last century or so. Housing in these areas varies greatly, but it consists mostly of apartment buildings, both old

and new.

Walking is still clearly a major mode of transport for many journeys in these areas. Neighborhood sidewalks are crowded.

They are lined with small stores as well as restaurants and cafés.

There are also numerous sidewalk kiosks where newspapers, flowers, and many other things are sold.

A certain number of shopping centers have been added to the mix in recent years. So far they seem to have strengthened neighborhood commerce.

Many of the inhabitants of these areas are in the habit of taking the subway or riding the bus.

A substantial percentage even of prosperous households are carfree.³ And, if only because the area is busy and safe, it’s a magnet for people not only from the entire metropolitan area but from all over the world. Its inhabitants, as a result, have long since become accustomed to being in a place with people of many cultures and ethnicities.

Daily life in the central and northern parts of the city of Buenos Aires, in other words, resembles daily life in the other places in the world where well-off or middle-class people have been living at a high density over several square kilometers close to the CBD for many years, for example, in much of Manhattan; in most of central Paris and the analogous parts of many other large European cities; along the northern edge of Hong Kong Island; and possibly in a few areas in Tokyo. This really can’t be said of anywhere else in Latin America.

Argentina gradually lost its status as one of the world’s wealthiest countries after World War I. There were many reasons for Argentina’s much-commented-on decline. One factor was that the export of wheat and beef ceased to be the basis for great wealth. But poor government, corruption, and Argentina’s location on the periphery of the world trading system have also been proposed as reasons for Argentina’s problems.

Argentina, with a GNI per capita (PPP) of something like $20,250 (2017), remains a solidly middle-income country, and its middle-class and wealthy residents still live reasonably comfortable lives. Its poorer residents don’t, however. Income inequality is substantial,⁴ and what has been described as the “Latin Americanization” of Buenos Aires has been one of the major changes of the last few decades. Buenos Aires now has numerous squatter settlements, mostly away from its center, and there is a crime problem that it’s claimed simply didn’t exist in earlier times.

Over the last thirty or forty years, Buenos Aires has also suffered from the environmental problems that come with increasing automobile ownership. Despite a great deal of freeway construction, there are traffic jams on quite an impressive scale, and inner-city air quality can be poor. Higher automobile use also undermined Buenos Aires’ pretty good public transportation system, which includes Latin America’s oldest subway system, the Subte (whose first line opened in 1913), and what appears to be the most heavily patronized suburban railway network in the Western Hemisphere (its 800 km of tracks put it second in trackage length only to New York’s three systems). Both the Subte and the suburban rail network became pretty run-down by the 1990s.

Argentina could have allowed the automobile to continue to do its dirty work and ended up with a capital city whose central neighborhoods were just as depressed and decrepit as city centers in the rest of Latin America, but it didn’t.⁵ Over approximately the last thirty years, a series of generally unrelated and uncoordinated government actions have aimed to improve conditions for pedestrians and transit users in central Buenos Aires. While causation would be difficult to prove, these actions appear to have helped halt the decline, and many aspects of the traditional way of life of central Buenos Aires have been preserved.

[1] The rail lines were fixed up. Like many of the world’s cities, Buenos Aires has made an effort over the last two or three decades to revive its urban rail system. A few short subway extensions in the 1980s (including the “Premetro,” a light-rail line in the southwest) were the first steps in this process, which picked up in the 1990s. Operation of the Subte was turned over to private enterprise in 1994, and the new corporate managers renovated the stations and presided over the introduction of new rolling stock. Since then one new line (the north-south H Line) has been built, a short extension of the E line should open this year, and there are plans for further additions. The Subte these days appears to be doing pretty well. There are nearly a million passengers a day on weekdays (some sources say more than a million). The stations look great, and trains run frequently.

Buenos Aires is unusual in that its suburban rail lines carry more passengers than its subway. The Subte only serves the autonomous city of Buenos Aires, which has less than 20% of the urban area’s population and occupies something like 5% of its land area. The suburban rail lines cover an enormously larger area, and some of the lines run trains nearly as frequently as many of the world’s subway systems, every few minutes during rush hour and every fifteen minutes at midday and in the evening. The lines were all built by private enterprise and, as a result, are not all of the same gauge and use different propulsion systems. Furthermore, none of them quite reaches the central city; only one of the six termini is within easy walking distance of the Microcentro. There have been numerous attempts over the years to make the lines more useful. They were nationalized under the Perón government in 1948, but, in the ensuing decades, no government was willing to invest enough to maintain them. Thus, as was the case with the Subte, operation of the suburban rail lines was privatized in the 1990s. Many received new rolling stock as a result. In recent years, most of the rail lines have been renationalized and put under the control of parastatal firms. This time, the result has been a great deal of serious renovation. The impressive downtown termini have all been fixed up. Tracks are being repaired. Furthermore, the surface San Martín Line is being elevated for part of its way through the city, and the branch of the Belgrano Sur line that traditionally terminated awkwardly in the somewhat remote Buenos Aires station is being rerouted into the Constitución station.⁶

Furthermore, there are serious plans, not yet implemented, to create an RER network by means of tunnels through central Buenos Aires. This project would, of course, be quite expensive. Even without this final step, Buenos Aires’ elaborate rail system no longer feels as though it’s in decline. Some sources say there are approximately 1,400,000 passengers/day; other sources suggest a lower figure.

[2] The bus lines have been improved too. Buenos Aires’ buses, like those in most places, carry more passengers more places than its rail system, but, as everywhere, their effectiveness has been undermined by traffic congestion. Buenos Aires’ Metrobús system, an attempt to get around this problem, has been added to the public transport mix in the years since 2011. The Metrobús system is a kind of light BRT. Unlike in, say, Bogotá and Curitiba, it doesn’t involve distinct branding and rolling stock. Instead, long-established bus lines have been rerouted onto special lanes that have been constructed in the center of several of Buenos Aires streets. Some of the wider streets now have four bus lanes in their center; the outer lanes allow passing. The buses are still subject to red lights and, in most cases, the stations have no prepayment facilities, but route times have been speeded considerably. It hasn’t been very easy politically to create the Metrobús system, since, in most cases, adding the bus lanes meant reducing the number of car lanes, but the system is now up to more than 50 km, approximately as many as the Subte system.

[3] There have been some serious attempts to discipline drivers. Argentine drivers have a reputation for being quite aggressive. The Lonely Planet guidebook says that “Being a pedestrian in Argentina is perhaps one of the country’s more difficult ventures.”⁷ In fact, compared to their counterparts in, say, India or Indonesia, Argentine drivers seem pretty disciplined. They obey red lights. They know they’re supposed to yield to pedestrians when making turns and where there are clearly marked crosswalks, and, in my experience, they can almost always be persuaded to do the right thing, but aggressive pedestrian behavior is often required. This isn’t of course particularly comfortable or safe for pedestrians. When I was in Buenos Aires, there were signs all over the city telling drivers to yield to pedestrians (“Siempre prioridad peatón”). It would be nice to feel that these were having an effect. I did not, in any case, feel particularly unsafe there. The situation is roughly comparable to that in, say, New York or Chicago.

[4] Bicycle lanes have been added. Latin America, with its often narrow streets and aggressive drivers, isn’t a particularly logical place for pushing bicycle usage, but bicycle facilities have been added in numerous Latin American cities over the last ten years, including Buenos Aires. Protected bicycle lanes (“ciclovías”) appear to be particularly common in the most prosperous parts of the city, where they are definitely used at least to some extent.

There are also several streets in the old central business district, the Microcentro, where something like half the street has been turned into a pair of corridors that might be termed “bicycle-priority lanes.” The Spanish term for this arrangement is “carriles compartidos” (“shared lanes”).

[5] There has also been a great deal of street pedestrianization. This has been especially common in the Microcentro, where Calle Florida, pedestrianized several decades ago, was for many years considered the most important shopping street in Buenos Aires. Several other streets in or near the Microcentro have been pedestrianized in recent years.

It’s claimed that the advent of the Metrobús system has encouraged this since it’s allowed several routes that once ran on minor north-south streets to be moved to the Metrobús corridors along the Avenida 9 de Julio or along the route known as El Bajo that runs closer to the Rio de la Plata.

Further pedestrianization is planned. In one case a hybrid Metrobús/pedestrian corridor is under construction. Two lanes along several blocks of Avenida Corrientes, a street known for its entertainment venues, are to become a Metrobús corridor by day and a pedestrian corridor in the evening. (Exactly how this will work is a bit of a mystery.)

Unfortunately, some of Buenos Aires’ pedestrianized streets, while bustling by day and well into the evening, have acquired a reputation for being dangerous at night despite the presence of dozens of police officers.

[6] A serious effort is being made to fix up sidewalks. A major problem for pedestrians is that the sidewalks are not maintained very well.

Buenos Aires’ insistence on using ornamental bricks rather than concrete slabs means that sidewalks require frequent repair. A Plan Integral de Veredas (“Complete sidewalk plan”) has been established to deal with the problem. There were definitely quite a number of repair projects going on when I was in Buenos Aires last month. In the short term, these actually make walking a bit harder, because pedestrians must detour around construction zones, but they might eventually make a real difference.

[7] Parks are being added. Buenos Aires is not particularly well supplied with parkland, and most of the bigger parks that exist adjoin its well-off neighborhoods and are somewhat cut up by roads. There are some weekend road closings, for example in the 3 de Febrero Park, but they only help so much.

A particularly wonderful park that adjoins the central city has been added in the years since the 1980s: the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur. This park was created on islands in the Rio de la Plata that had formed to some extent accidentally as a result of river currents and landfill disposal. These islands eventually acquired plant cover and attracted wildlife, and they look natural even if they’re not at all. The area covered by the Reserva is bigger than Central Park,⁸ but the park includes substantial lakes and mangroves, and much of it is quite reasonably fenced off-to discourage pedestrian access. The paths that do exist enormously increase the number of close-to-CBD pedestrian spaces in Buenos Aires, and they get pretty busy on weekends.

[8] Puerto Madero, a new neighborhood, has been created to be pedestrian-friendly. Puerto Madero is a residential/commercial neighborhood that has been replacing the old, obsolete port since the 1990s. It is comparable in many ways to neighborhoods like London’s Docklands and Hamburg’s HafenCity. As in these other cities, the designers of Puerto Madero preserved some older buildings (as well as numerous cranes). They also added quite a few, including many of Buenos Aires’ largest skyscrapers, some residential and some commercial.

As with other “neoliberal” urban renewal projects throughout the world, Puerto Madero’s advertising often stresses its ecological soundness, including its pedestrian facilities, but there is no hiding its attempt to be sound commercially as well. Puerto Madero includes, for example, two pedestrian “streets” along the old harbor. But these aren’t the kind of streets where local people leave off their dry cleaning on the way to work. They’re lined so completely with cafés and restaurants as to become a little uncomfortable for pedestrians who simply want to walk. Elsewhere, the streets of Puerto Madero have good, wide sidewalks, and there are several new parks as well, but the developers have included parking facilities in every building and have also left space for arterials.⁹ Puerto Madero was clearly not built for pedestrians in quite the way that much of the Palermo district, for example, was, but at least pedestrians have not been forgotten. And no one would argue that Puerto Madero is a failure. It’s become the most expensive place to live in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires, in other words, has made a real effort in recent years to restore and improve the status, safety, and comfort of pedestrians and transit users in much of its central city. The phrase that much of the extensive documentation on this effort sometimes uses is “prioridad peatonal” (literally, “pedestrian priority”).¹⁰ By all accounts this effort has been reasonably successful. It’s also been popular politically, at least with the inhabitants of the central city, who (unlike most Latin Americans) have never lost their taste for high-density urban life. The well-off and middle-class parts of the city of Buenos Aires still seem for the most part to be healthy, reasonably safe, and deeply urban places.¹¹