Building a Sustainable, Healthy City with Multimodal Urbanism in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Published 08/20/2025 in Scholar Travel Stipend
Written
by Ramsay Goyal |
08/20/2025
The street of Buenos Aires are littered with a multimodal canopy of pedestrian, cyclist, bus, and vehicular infrastructure. On the widest street in the city, the 18 lane “Avenida 9 de Julio” street, a center-running bus rapid transit system occupies two lanes in each direction. Although the city maintains a car-dominated landscape, one can feasibly connect neighborhood to neighborhood, suburb to city center, and throughout the entire city without owning or renting a vehicle. Such green urban infrastructure investments support environmental sustainability, improved public health, and inclusive mobility throughout the Buenos Aires metro area.
There is just one problem keeping the city from a truly sustainable, multimodal system for all: the system is quite inaccessible to tourists. While some buses are gaining contactless credit card readers, most buses require Buenos Aires-specific transit cards that can only be obtained and refilled at Subway stations. Consequently, to first access the city’s bus network, a visitor must first visit a subway station, which are more limited across the city. Additionally, they may not even know that this step is necessary to take, and then know how to use the bus once obtaining a metro card.
Bikeshare also suffers from visitor accessibility – compared to Paris, where tourists and locals have the same process and relative ease of purchase to attain a day pass for 5 euros for the bike share system, EcoBici in Buenos Aires requires a copious amount of information from visitors to begin using its bike share network. Besides the typical expected account sign-up information, the EcoBici app requires full passport information, including birth dates and expiration dates, as well as home address. Once an account is created with all of these options, there were options to choose a desired pass, such as a full day pass (for a cost), a single 45 minute ride (for a cost), or unlimited free 30 minute rides Monday through Friday. However, even the 30 minute free pass option still required to then input a credit card information to be able to receive the pass.
The most difficult piece of information to input, and the sticking point that I could not proceed past in the EcoBici app, was on the credit card information page asking for a DNI, which is an Argentinean term for an identification number. This was required information to be coupled with the credit card information to verify the credit card, and all Argentineans are assigned a DNI on their driver’s license, which is linked to their credit card. For tourists, your passport number becomes your DNI; however, Americans do not have their passport number linked to their credit card. As a result, the system would decline any American credit card I attempted to use, as the DNI did not match. While the credit cards of other countries may prove more successful, it was frustrating for this already 15 minute-long sign-up process to end unsuccessfully.
However, despite these challenges to be accessible to tourists, the system only primarily needs to cater toward locals in order to make a tangible impact on creating a more sustainable city. Local residents form the backbone, and highest proportion of users, of a multimodal system, as they traverse the city every day. In this aspect, EcoBici seemed to shine. Stations in the bike share network saw frequent usage, and the bright blue EcoBici bikes were observed on bike paths across the city. Indeed, after a one-time (albeit laborious) sign up process, residents seemed to be able to access the system with ease. Stations were well positioned near population centers, along bike lanes, and proximate to other forms of transportation, such as subway stations and bus rapid transit stops.
Bike infrastructure could be found on streets big and small. Some streets, despite only having one travel lane for vehicles, had two-way protected bike lanes with striping through the intersections. In the U.S., this type of bicycle facility can cost up to $5 million a mile to implement, and often requires removing an existing parking or travel lane, often to public dismay. However, most streets in the center of Buenos Aires are configured for one way travel, meaning that impacts to street design could have smaller traffic impacts but still deliver outsized sustainability benefits.
Many two-way cycle tracks also included bicycle-specific signals, distinct from signals referenced by drivers. Beyond providing distinct traffic guidance to improve the experience of cyclists, these bicycle signals also provide an opportunity for Buenos Aires to synchronize signals to bicyclist speeds. Most U.S. cities focus synchronization plans on vehicular traffic, but some cities, such as New York City, have lately begun experimenting with bike-specific synchronization. Indeed, bike signals can open up the opportunity for conveniences such as bike-specific signal synchronization that entices even more residents to move around the city on a bicycle, improving public health and creating a more sustainable city in the process.
Other notable city design elements in Buenos Aires further encourage multi-mobility. Many streets throughout Buenos Aires are narrower, with fewer lanes than typically seen in the US. Narrower streets naturally encourage drivers to slow down, which provides a safer environment for other road users (such as cyclists) who may choose to share the road.
Additionally, the city was consciously designed for those on foot. Indeed, many public green spaces were littered throughout the city with wide walking areas, to encourage and enhance pedestrian movement patterns throughout the city. Some streets, like the popular Calle Florida, are closed to cars entirely, and only accessible to pedestrians, who flock to them in large numbers, even in the middle of winter.
These observed patterns of interconnectivity provide lessons for U.S. transit systems, which frequently suffer from a ‘first/last mile’ problem of mobility. Across much of America, even if a more sustainable transit system could supply 90% of an individual’s commute or journey, if there is no feasible way to complete that remaining 10% of the journey, many will opt to use a more-polluting single occupancy vehicle for the entirety of the trip. While many cities in the U.S. may lack transit systems that serve every neighborhood, Buenos Aires solves this issue with the colocation of EcoBici stops near major transit hubs. This bike share network functions as an extension of the city’s high-capacity, high-frequency BRT and rail system, providing ways to access specific destinations deeper into individual communities. U.S. cities can adopt many of these same lessons to supplement transit: Extending bike share programs with additional stations near transit stops has a far lower barrier to entry and reduced cost compared to extending transit, and can be accomplished in the short-term while major, long-term infrastructure projects are underway. Beyond bikeshare, American cities could also consider the creation of park and ride facilities offering free parking at transit hubs to encourage commuters to use their vehicles on only the most necessary portions of their trip (commuting to and from a rail station where no other convenient transit exists). While tourists may not have benefited from EcoBici mobilty in Buenos Aires, the system provided lessons to ways to deliberately design a more eco-friendly metropolis across the world.
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