Editorial-Introduction special issue transport & health in Latin America

Links between transportation and health have been well studied (Mindell, 2004, 2018; Jenny Mindell and Karlsen, 2012; Rydin, 2012; Rydin et al., 2012) in recent years. The role of active transport as part of daily routines, for example, has excited considerable interest for its potential for reducing pathologies associated with sedentarism, overweight and obesity, in journals and at international meetings (Lyn and Sallis, 2018). These have stimulated interest and built closer ties between researchers and practitioners.

But links between transport and health go far beyond active transport, raising issues of governance, social equity, urban planning procedures and principles in “normal” and crisis conditions, as previous special issues of this journal have documented, particularly Road Danger Reduction (Hine and Tight, 2017), Walking and Walkability (Kraft et al., 2017), Built Environment (Frank et al., 2016), Public Transport (Mulley et al., 2016), Mobility in later life (Musselwhite et al., 2015), Walking & Cycling (Alvanides, 2014).

Most of this groundbreaking research, however, reflects knowledge emerging mainly in developed countries, where cars predominate on roads, usually with very high modal shares, accounting for the vast majority of trips (LTAAcademy, 2011). This system of “automobility” (Sheller and Urry, 2000; Beckmann, 2001; Urry, 2004) has placed cars at the centre of transport and city planning and, ideologically, made them a key measure of freedom, social progress and economic development. Automobility plays out very differently, however, in the Global South, where cars clog the roads but are accessible to only a minority of the population, due to widely disparate levels of wealth and income. These issues make sustainable mobility and health central to equity and the social sustainability of transport in diverse and sometimes hard to identify ways.

Thus, it was with considerable interest and growing excitement that the guest editors of this special issue on Transport & Health in Latin America watched articles arrive, in response to a general call in 2018. The articles in this special issue build on significant precursors, exploring bicycle choice modeling in a northern city in Colombia (Orozco-Fontalvo et al., 2018) and how low-income sectors in Sao Paulo gain access to much needed health care services (Alcaíno, 2008). Latin America has long been a factory of innovation, in participation, with participatory budgeting, and in transportation, by inventing bus rapid transit, car-free Sunday events based on Bogotá’s Ciclovias, new approaches to cycle-inclusive planning, among others.

In this issue, six articles explore factors influencing health and transportation in Latin America, bringing into focus the health effects of gender and other forms of violence in traffic (Batista dos Santos et al., 2020), in university-related travel (Capasso da Silva and Rodrigues da Silva, 2020), disability (Orellana et al., 2020), stress and cognitive performance (Jimenez-Vaca et al., 2020), and how masculinity might play a role increasing the chnace of crashes (Torres-Quintero et al., 2019). The challenges inherent in efforts to improve traffic and reduce fatalities are also present, in key findings regarding crash risk (Picado-Aguilar and Aguero-Valverde, 2020) and patterns of public, private and active travel (de Moraes Ferrari, Kovalskys et al., 2020) in Latin America.

Other articles, published in earlier issues, reveal that amidst the challenges, mobilizing the creativity of researchers and local communities can turn “safe” into “cool” routes and make local schools mobilizing points for gender, civic education and participatory urbanism (Sagaris and Lanfranco, 2019), thereby addressing the social determinants of health. After years of treating transport as gender neutral, this research underlines the variety of mechanisms through which gender and poverty affect health when transport systems are indifferent to these issues, as demonstrated by articles from Argentina (Mark and Heinrichs, 2019), Colombia (M. Orozco-Fontalvo et al., 2019) and Bolivia (Kash, 2019), particularly gender violence and the potential for adequate responses to significantly improve transport for all (Sagaris, 2019).

As the coronavirus sweeps cities worldwide, profoundly altering a way of life based on many toxic habits — high consumption, high dependency on fossil fuels, destruction of crucial habitats and eco-system services — we need to look more closely at these and other health-transport links emerging in the Global South. As the virus struck Latin American cities, Bogota's local government expanded Ciclovias, making the cycle routes a permanent part of city streets to promote social distancing, while in Santiago some mayors were closing parks, but leaving malls open for business as usual. How the health-transport links identified to date are put to work in this new environment, amidst the additional challenges of climate and global change, requires expanding on existing research and applying increasingly sophisticated analyses that can help policy-makers and civil society define the best ways forward for each particular place. These challenges also highlight opportunities to make cities more resilient, by paying more attention to health-transport links and their potential to drive positive change.

The guest editors would like to express our profound thanks to outgoing editor, Jenny Mindell, and incoming editor, Charles Musselwhite, for guiding us through a difficult but rewarding process that, we hope, will motivate new research from our own and other regions in the Global South to enrich human knowledge of these crucial health-transport connections. Urban and regional planning are indeed powerful tools for change, and this research will help to define how, along with encouraging more work on these important topics.