"The Bogotá Living Lab focuses on exploring the intricacies of informal transport in low-income and peripheral areas, aiming to develop comprehensive strategies that enhance equitable and sustainable urban mobility by addressing unique challenges in service provision and labor dynamics."
About Bogota Living Lab
These communities, found mainly in the south and southwest, have historically low levels of access to public transport. Although the public transport system coverage is acceptable, route frequencies are very low in those zones, providing a low level of service.
This Living Lab seeks to understand the challenges posed by the urban dynamics of informal transport in different modalities. This lab aims to unravel the unique complexities faced by these communities in the realm of urban mobility, the provision of the service, and the labor market. With an eye on these specific challenges, the Bogotá Living Lab aims to understand and formulate integrative and effective solutions. The ultimate goal is to contribute to the development of comprehensive strategies that address the distinct needs of these communities, fostering a more equitable and sustainable urban transport.
Bogotá is the capital of Colombia, a highly urbanized city characterized by inequality levels, also reflected in an uneven distribution of opportunities, making socioeconomic segregation visible. The city has about 7.45 million inhabitants and an urbanized area of approximately 380 km2, which results in an average population density of 196 inhabitants/ha. About 13.9 million trips are made daily in a typical day of 2023 in Bogotá. Most trips use active transport modes (approximately 44% of the daily trips), and public transport (nearly 29% of the trips). Lower-income segments rely on public transport services and walking. Throughout the city, nearly 106,000 trips are made daily in informal transport.
Bogotá has an integrated public transport system comprising a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), regular buses, and a cable car system. Currently, a metro system is under construction along with the second line of a cable car. Bogotá’s spatial structure has features that make the operation of public transport at a large scale relatively easy. However, there are still large gaps between rich and poor, where low-income households are disadvantaged in location (housing location vs. employment location) and mobility (higher travel times and costs). Besides, an important share of low-income households experience low levels of accessibility, much lower than the average, as a result of their disproportionately low access to workplaces. Despite this, Bogotá is committed to active and sustainable transport, seeking to improve the quality of life of its citizens. As seen, there are great challenges ahead. One of them is informal transport.
This Living Lab adopts a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to better understand, characterize, and propose innovative solutions for informal transport in Bogotá, with attention to community needs.
Focus groups with users and drivers/operators were first conducted to assess contextual conditions, service quality, operational dynamics, and governance structures. A participatory social mapping exercise complemented this work by identifying travel patterns, trip purposes, and the barriers and enablers of these systems. In parallel, user surveys with a stated-preference component enabled discrete choice modeling to examine operational factors, contextual conditions, and user perceptions influencing mode choice.
Building on this diagnostic phase, the Living Lab organized collaborative workshops grounded in the Theory of Change methodology, where users and operators co-designed strategies and interventions to address persistent challenges. Actor mapping was also undertaken with community stakeholders to identify key actors, their relationships, and the ecosystem in which informal transport emerges as a response to unmet mobility demands.
The resulting data informed governance analyses and agent-based simulations of user behavior, highlighting how institutional recognition and policy or operational interventions influence mode choice. Additionally, dissemination and engagement activities—such as public sessions and interviews with decision-makers—positioned the Living Lab as a communication platform linking community-driven proposals with policy discussions.
Finally, the initiative promotes knowledge exchange through public events, interviews, and audiovisual documentation. It also sponsors Master’s scholarships at Universidad de los Andes and University College London, launches fellowships for independent projects on informal transport, and hosts online workshops for regional early-career researchers
The Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, is the primary sponsor of the Bogotá Living Lab. Through its Faculty of Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the University provides crucial support and resources. This partnership underscores the university's commitment to innovation in studying informal transport dynamics, highlighting a collaborative approach between academia and real-world problem-solving. We also work together with The Bartlett Development Planning Unit of UCL and Wawa, a technological platform for collective mobility.
The Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, VREF, funds this living lab, fostering research and education oriented to the future of urban transport (FTU), looking at how to deal with the complexity of transportation in the global south, in this case, Bogotá.
The Bogota Living Lab plans to publish in the Grupo SUR website, the research group in charge of the Living Lab, to showcase research, publications, events, and other related information. This site will serve as the main hub for sharing insights and outcomes of the Living Lab's activities. Furthermore, the Living Lab plans to have outreach on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and others for communication and dissemination purposes. This project aims to organize a regional summit on informal transportation in Latin America, and it will be hosted by the Universidad de Los Andes.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
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Recent Highlights
Over the past year, the Bogotá Living Lab has undertaken a wide range of activities aligned with the objectives defined at its inception.
- Diagnostic Phase and Collaborative Design: Focus groups were conducted with users and informal transport operators to assess service quality, operational dynamics, safety, and governance. This diagnostic process identified three core challenges in Bogotá’s informal transport system: road safety, lack of formal recognition, and community-level conflicts. Building on these findings, we organized collaborative workshops grounded in the Theory of Change methodology, allowing users and operators to co-design strategies and interventions to address these issues. These activities form the basis of the paper currently under review: Oviedo, D., Sánchez, J. E., Guevara-Aladino, P., & Guzmán, L.A. (Under Review). "From Diagnosis to Action: A Theory of Change Framework for Informal and Shared Mobility in Bogotá." This work is under peer review for publication in the Journal of Transport Geography, as part of the special issue on “Urban Living Labs and Inclusive, Accessible and Sustainable Transport Systems.”
- Community-Driven Solutions & Workshops: The Living Lab facilitated the workshops with users and operators to collaboratively propose community-based solutions for each of the three core challenges: road safety, lack of formal recognition, and community-level conflicts. These were accompanied by events to share preliminary results with the community.
- Survey and Discrete Choice Modeling: We collected a set of user surveys with a stated-preference component, enabling discrete choice models to analyze how sociodemographic, labor, and perceptual factors influence mode choice. One key finding is that attitudes such as transport needs and satisfaction have greater influence than broader social beliefs. Moreover, both the purpose and frequency of use are significant factors influencing the continued use of informal transport modes. These results are presented in: Guzmán, L.A., Sánchez, J.E., & Cantillo-García, V.A. (Under Review). "What is Fueling Informal Rides? Identifying the Determinants of Informal Transport in Bogotá, Colombia." This work will be presented at the World Conference on Transport Research (WCTR) 2026 and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.
- Governance, Network Analysis, and Simulation: Ongoing analyses include governance structures, actor recognition, and network modeling to understand the dynamics of informal transport operation. We are also developing an agent-based simulation to assess demand elasticities based on operational attributes and contextual community conditions.
- International Collaboration with San José Living Lab: A collaborative comparative study with the San José Living Lab is underway, focused on shared and informal transport systems in peripheral areas of Latin American cities. During a recent visit, the San José team participated in Bogotá workshops and conducted technical visits to observe Bogotá’s informal systems—bicitaxis, shared taxis, and collective cars—as case studies.
Next on the List
The Bogotá Living Lab will continue advancing research on informal and shared mobility—a largely underexplored area. We are currently analyzing the data collected during previous phases and preparing a series of academic publications and reports, including:
- Community-driven proposals for informal mobility improvements
- A governance and institutional recognition analysis
- A network analysis of actors influencing informal transport operations
- A comparative study with San José on service quality, operational dynamics and stakeholder interaction networks.
We also plan to host an intersectoral meeting with policymakers to present findings and foster dialogue around community needs and proposed interventions in Bogotá’s informal transport sector.
MEDIA GALLERY
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Slide 1: Insights from the focus groups conducted with the studied communities and the field data collection process.
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Slide 2: Insights from the working groups conducted with the studied communities and the proposed co-designed strategies.Collaborative exchange between Bogotá and Costa Rica Living Labs – and technical visits.
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Slide 3: Collaborative exchange between Bogotá and Costa Rica Living Labs – and technical visits.
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