Bogota Road Safety

The concept of road safety as a public policy issue emerged in the 1990s as a response to the high homicide rates in the city. In this context, violence is considered a public health problem. The mayor and local government officials focused on road safety after realizing that many deaths were caused by road collisions. This is how the Citizenship Culture principle that “Life is sacred” emerged and became the policy framework to address road safety issues through public engagement programs. The capacity for Bogota to rapidly improve road safety at a city level was facilitated by changes in the regulatory framework at the national level: constitutional reforms that provided for the direct election of a City Mayor by the people of Bogota, devolution of road safety education responsibilities to the city, and the establishment of a National Road Code and a National Road Safety Agency.
Following the empowerment of the elected City Mayor, reforms at the city level helped generate an institutional framework that was conducive to improving road safety: a shift in the relationship between …show more content…
The implementation of the bus network with exclusive lanes recommended in the plan was enhanced by transportation planners by introducing features from the international experience, especially Curitiba in Brazil. The organization of public transport services by introducing the BRT system has had a positive impact on road safety indicators due to improvements in the operational services as well as an infrastructure that segregates different transportation modes by giving priority to mass transit. The infrastructure and sustainable mobility approach has faced issues such as an unexpected increase in demand (ridership) that has led operators to increase the number of extra hours for some drivers who potentially could increase the level of risks given exhaustion after several hours of