Summer 2001 Research Report Aaron Golub "Welfare Analysis of Informal Transit Services in Brazil and the Effects of Regulation"

 

My Tinker foundation grant was used to fund a 5-week trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in order to continue field work for my doctoral dissertation in Urban Planning and Transportation Engineering. My work involves understanding how changes in an urban transportation system combined with the characteristics of its users result in changes in choices, patterns of travel, and regional economic welfare.

More specifically, I am looking at the effects of growing informality in urban transportation services in developing countries. Transportation policies addressing informality will be studied to predict their effects on the populations dependent on the informal transportation modes. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, there is such an informal system connecting the poor northern periphery of the city and the downtown, via the "Central Station" transportation terminal. This is the corridor proposed for use in this study. The system consists of "vanspools" which are best described as shared taxis or jitneys and operate on fixed or semi-fixed routes, picking up and dropping off passengers at any point along the way. The illegal van systems compete directly with formal bus or rail systems, might serve areas previously underserved by transit, and/or behave as feeder services to the formal system. Currently, the policies proposed by the city to regulate the system vary between prohibition, recognition and regulation, and the incorporation of the van services into the formal transport system.

In the first part of my field work, completed last year, I studied the "user-side" of the problem: characteristics of the users and how they make choices between transportation modes. I performed interviews with close to 600 different public transit riders bound for the study area from the central city. This final trip, funded by the Tinker Foundation Grant, was dedicated to gathering data on the "supply-side" of the problem: characteristics of the transportation system itself. Data gathered included commute times for users in various areas of the city by rail, bus, and the informal mode specifically being studied. Other data was collected to be able to estimate the effects of policies on these characteristics, such as road capacities, travel speeds, and the behavior of peak hour versus off-peak traffic. Finally, interviews were done with several transportation policy experts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and several van operators in order to formulate a group of feasible policy scenarios to be tested in the study.

The trip was important in helping me complete the last remaining field work my dissertation needed before its planned completion during the summer of 2002. I am now putting together the traveler behavior data with the policy scenarios to look at their effects on the welfare of populations in the region.

The study will lead to an understanding of the consumer-side benefits of informal transportation operations, which could be important to help form policies made in the short term in several Brazilian cities. Understanding the benefits and costs of informal transport, however, can have much wider applications. It is rare that a study focuses solely on the travel behavior of the poor, and the results might be applicable to other urban areas within Latin America, and other regions in the world as well. Urbanization rates are large in developing countries worldwide, and similar periphery-to-downtown travel patterns are growing in significance in numerous cities. Furthermore, there is growing concern for exploding personal vehicle use in large developing countries like China, India, and Brazil. Understanding how travelers accept jitney systems that offer real alternatives to personal vehicles could be useful in working towards solutions to those problems. There may even be applications to similar problems in the developed world where congestion is a growing problem.