Interview with road safety and sustainable transport expert Álvaro Guzmán
meta-kinisi: What is your background and what are you working on now?
AG: I have spent all of my professional life working on transport. I grew up around buses because my dad used to import buses from Brazil, which has a huge bus manufacturing industry, and sell them here in Ecuador. He really liked his job because it kept him close to Brazil. When I graduated from university, one of the people my dad was working with invited me to do my internship at a bus manufacturing company called Busscar in the south of Brazil. It was supposed be a 90-day internship, but I ended up spending over a year there. While I was working for Busscar, they had an issue at their factory. Busscar was producing the body of the buses and the chassis were coming from other, big manufacturers like Volvo, Scania, Mercedes. Busscar assembled the buses at the factory, but there were always some parts missing, like the spare tyre or the fire extinguisher. We did not know whose fault this was and, as I knew Spanish and English and I was learning Portuguese, I was sent to Volvo in Curitiba to investigate why this was happening. In Curitiba I came across their Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. We had BRTs in Ecuador, but they were much smaller-scale and less developed than those in Brazil. And when I saw that I said “OK, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life!”.
I started reading more about transport, going to seminars, learning things that the university never taught me because up to then I had studied business and finance. From there I went all the way to being the Director of Ecuador’s National Transport Agency, with many other stages in between. Currently, I am working at the Global Road Safety Partnership, an NGO that is based in Switzerland. We fund road safety projects in low and middle-income countries around the world. I am responsible for Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, and for now supporting the work in Brazil and Argentina. We fund local NGOs through competitive funds. We have a very specific mandate; we advocate for national policies around five risk factors. We try to bring international evidence and best practices to these organisations so that they can advocate for that in their countries. I also do some consultancy work.
meta-kinisi: There is also something about broccoli?
AG: Yes! I have a good friend whose family are the largest exporters of broccoli in Ecuador. I am pretty sure that at some point in Barcelona or in Athens you have eaten Ecuadorian broccoli from them. When I came back to Ecuador after doing my Masters in Leeds in 2010, the company was dealing with transport problems. Being frozen food, it’s a sensitive product and transport needs to be reliable and efficient. So, I offered my help and, long story short, I ended up with a lorry company. We – myself with this friend and others – now manage over 30 lorries for transporting the broccoli. I ran that company for three years. It was an enjoyable experience, but working on operations is really difficult! It is the toughest part of any industry, a 24h/ 365-days-a-year job. I am no longer involved in the operations, but I am still a partner at the company. I recently developed its road safety plan as I know the industry quite well.
meta-kinisi: Moving on to your PhD research, why did you decide to focus on the role of power in transport planning?
AG: I must say power found me! My main question when I started was why are we not implementing policies to improve transport when there is so much evidence showing what needs to be done. We know that we need to invest more in public transport, that we need to reallocate space from cars to other modes, that we need to create environments that are suitable for women, children, walking and cycling. And, we know that that all these policies help cities function better. So why are they not happening? My supervisors were Professor Karen Lucas and Professor Greg Marsden, they were great at guiding me on what to read, they were the best I could ask for. So, at some point I found this Danish guy called Bent Flyvbjerg, who talks about power and planning. I initially wanted to understand the role of power in the implementation of all transport solutions and then we decided to narrow the scope and look at the role of power behind BRT systems.
For me, it was fantastic. I really loved the experience of reading philosophy again, from Aristotle to Foucault, Nietzsche, the things you come across at school but never really understand how important they are in everything, including in planning a transport solution. These are difficult authors to read and understand, but I enjoyed it and I still I enjoy it because I use it at work and even in my everyday decision making. It was transformative, it made a lot of things easy for me, definitely.
One of the main messages of my PhD is that there are many “truths” in every aspect of our lives that are not definitely truths. There are these dominant ideas that we take for granted in our planning processes and it's very, very hard to break them. In order to break them, I think that it is key to understand the role of power. An example from transport is building more and larger road infrastructure in cities to favour the movement of cars. What is behind those ideas? If there is something behind them? Sometimes we think the industry is behind them. But maybe the industry is not even thinking about it. They are a part of the dominant ideas, but they are not doing any work to support them. Probably they did the lobbying in the 50s and 60s that embedded these ideas in society, and we just keep doing it.
In the case of BRTs, there was a 1978 document by the World Bank, which stated that buses on their own right of way should be implemented in cities to improve public transport. If you read the document, it basically talks about how you can give loans to cities so that they can build more infrastructure. Because of that document, a lot of money began to be put on BRTs and in 1981 the first BRT line was implemented in Curitiba. If you ask someone that builds a BRT now, they will never tell you that it was a World Bank idea. They will probably tell you that it is an engineering solution for managing congestion in cities.
I did two cases studies in completely different contexts, and I found that there is this dominant idea that fluidity of vehicles is very important. It's all about moving machines: buses, trains, airplanes. But, maybe it's more important to have order, maybe it's more important to have safety. We need to challenge this idea that we have to keep moving machines for the sake of moving them. We need to talk about taking people to where they need to go and not forget that they have needs that need to be satisfied. We may focus on getting the engineering part right, but we don’t communicate why we make the interventions we make. Communication about transport interventions is very important and that was another key message of my PhD.
meta-kinisi: You are based in Ecuador, which would you say are the country’s most critical transport challenges?
AG: Like in every country, there are many challenges, and it would be unfair to just mention a few.
There is definitely a lack of investment in transport. Specifically, there is a lack of continuous investment. We recently opened the first subway line here in Quito. It took 15 years to build, it’s now working and it’s very nice, but that’s it. It not just about building the BRT or a subway line. Transport is like other services. You cannot build a hospital and leave it there, you need to keep financing its operation and everything that is related to it. The same goes for transport; it needs consistent investment.
There is also something that is very particular to Latin America, or maybe it is also the case in other similar economies, and it is the enormous rise in the use of motorcycles. After 2020, it has gone mad. Here in Ecuador, the motorcycles sold last year were twice as many as the cars. Colombia sold more motorcycles per capita than most countries in the world last year! This is causing a huge health problem because people are dying by the dozens, or losing their limbs or ending up in critical health conditions. The rise was so sudden and there was no preparation in the driving culture. I’m working on this right now in all the countries that I am doing work on road safety and we really don't know what to do. We are only starting to understand the phenomenon to start thinking about solutions.
Behind this rise was partly that people preferred to use motorcycles instead of public transport during the pandemic, but it is also that the quality of public transport is getting worse. For a country like ours, where the income levels are low, cars are still extremely expensive but motorcycles are a good alternative, and they are also fast and efficient. They are also a working solution as people use them to do deliveries. But these benefits are tiny compared to the challenges and road safety issues they cause.
Something very revealing is also that around 52% of new buyers of motorcycles in Ecuador are women. What is this telling us? That public transport is bad for everybody, and it is particularly bad for women. That is understandable because we never thought about women when we designed our public transport. We know women have their own economy, they have their own way of understanding the world. For them it is important to take the children to school, then do the groceries and other chores, and then go to their paid jobs outside their home. But we are still designing the transport system for a man that goes to the office at 9 and comes back at 5. So these groups that are left out, particularly women, are finding their own solutions. And, it's really, really sad especially because women use the motorcycle as a family car and carry their children around, so the number of their deaths and injuries is going to increase.
Road safety more broadly is a huge issue in Latin America. At some point at the beginning of the last decade, all Latin American countries, including Ecuador, did a huge amount of work on road safety and we managed to bring down the number of road deaths, which remained stable for many years. Now this number is starting to rise again because of the increased use of motorcycles but also the constant infrastructure decay, no or very little maintenance, and of course, the lack of finance for that.
At the same time, we have the same problems that the rest of the world is facing: global warming, climate change. We are not really thinking as a country around that, but it is already causing a lot of problems. Sometimes we think it is lack of maintenance, but it's actually climate change. Last year we didn't see rain for almost eight months and then, in the first two-three months of the year we had more rain than we usually get over the whole year. So that causes huge disruption in transport infrastructure.
meta-kinisi: You have also worked in government, can you describe what were the most important lessons you learned during that time?
AG: I was the Undersecretary of Transport and the Director of the National Transit Agency. It’s hard to describe the experience; you have so much responsibility and there are so many things happening at the same time. If you don't have a good team, you can really go mad. The most important challenge was having a good national team, in the office and around the country. I was lucky, because when I arrived I found a great group of people that were not completely motivated, and I found out that I was good at dealing with that. Here when you get into government, you get a position with a code, SP1, SP2, etc., which reflects the organisational hierarchy and the level of technical work that you do. I remember in one of my first meetings with a small group of collaborators I asked “What do you do here in the ministry?” Their responses were “I'm an SP3, SP5, etc”. I let them finish and then said “What gets you out of bed in the morning, what do you tell your children? That you’re going to the ministry “to be an SP7”?”. I then asked them to have another meeting the following week where they should describe to me their jobs as if they would if they wanted to make their children feel proud of them. They came back and talked about the real things they were doing or wanted to do but are not able to. After this, people started to come up with new ideas, being more proactive about their work. In government, because there is always lack of resources, you need to be a little bit more proactive.
I learned many lessons in this role. The most important was to value the civil service. Without civil servants, countries do not work. I can imagine that in Greece you also have this narrative that civil servants are lazy and that we spend too much money on them. I never shared this view but when I worked for the government, I realised that civil servants know so much about the real issues, they do so much of the work, and they can come up with so many fast, effective solutions.
A very difficult part of my job was dealing with transport unions. I believe that unions are very important. But these transport unions were working for the benefit of their managers, not their members. For example, the ministry and the agency give permits for operating transport routes, which of course means money for the operators. These permits require a study to understand the status of the route, assess if frequency needs to be changed etc. The transport unions were telling me what kind of permits should be given, not because they did studies but because they already had an operator as a client and that’s how they financed themselves. The unions charge the operators who are awarded the routes, claiming they lobby for them. In reality, this is corruption, and it affected the communities served by those routes. Sometimes two competing companies would end up operating the same route, racing each other to get more passengers and having big crashes.
My role was a political appointment. I resigned before the government was out, because I was not very happy with them. It was an election year and during these years the pressures increase. I felt that I had a bigger objective when I decided to take this position, and sometimes to get there you need to do certain things you because “that’s how they work”. It was not necessarily wrong or right and I did not like this aspect of the job, but it’s something you learn to deal with in that sort of positions. But I was not going to take the pressure of an election year.
meta-kinisi: We believe that Greece, as well as other countries, may benefit from learning about the Latin American experience on transport, as we have similarities in the social and cultural context. Can you share with us some of your successes? Also, to what extent do transport planners and policymakers in Ecuador look into European practices?
AG: First of all, most of the literature comes from the Global North, so we are always learning about what is happening there, increasingly more about Europe, even though the biggest influence has been the United States for a long time. Lately, the European Commission has turned its attention to Latin America. They have a huge programme for middle-sized cities and there are lots of foreign aid opportunities. For example, there is a huge EU-funded programme called EUROCLIMA to implement sustainable transport policies. When I was at the ministry, we competed against other countries, and we were awarded funding to develop the national policy for sustainable urban mobility. This is interesting because it shows how foreign money works: we got the funding, but they did not let us hire those who would work on it. They hired an international consultant to develop the policy. Of course, they normally hire some local consultants too, but the big chunk of money goes back to Europe through European consultancies. We created the policy, and I was lucky to be part of it, working closely with and advising the consultants. However, the purpose of developing this national policy is to give European consultants work in Ecuador. Because without a national policy, how could they start developing Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) for cities?
We are now receiving funds to do the SUMPs. I'm currently participating in a bid, competing with other five consultancies: three are German, one is French, and one is Spanish. The European Union wants us to have SUMPs. They're not doing anything wrong, but the SUMP concept itself is very European. We need sustainable transport plans but through a process and concept developed here, considering our context, our history and the problems we are facing. This is not done with bad intentions, but it is a very eurocentric way of thinking that everything that evolves around Europe is good and it should be replicated elsewhere, even in places that are thousands of kilometres away. I am not saying this to complain, I understand the logic of it. I'm just explaining to you why “we are looking at Europe”. We don’t necessarily look for examples, sometimes they are given to us. That's probably what is also happening in Greece. Where is the money to do transport policy in Greece coming from? You are probably implementing British ideas, French ideas, but not necessarily Greek ideas. I'm not saying this to show off, but I think that if our proposal wins, at least we are going to be able to say: “this is working in Europe, but not necessarily here in Quito”. We have this problem with the motorcycles, for example, but that is not an issue that the Germans are facing.
I also have to say that here in Latin America we've been very good at finding cheap solutions. The BRT is probably the most successful story, but we have an impressive number of public transport users, much higher than in any other European city, and all our public transport systems are built on or over the ground. Of course, we need to improve and better support this system that is so poorly funded, yet it moves so many people every day and in such a cheap way.
meta-kinisi: What makes you the happiest and what disappoints you the most in your job?
AG: In my current job, I enjoy travelling to countries I love, like Mexico, and learning how things are being done in these other contexts. I also enjoy meeting others with the same passion for transport and life. For example, when I meet these guys who are passionate about helmets, I am thinking that they are doing so much for society but they are being ignored because not many people appreciate their importance. What disappoints me is not being able to implement necessary and simple solutions because of power forces.
Roadworks in central London. The road is probably closed. London, March 2025.