CESTA

Promotion of Bicycle and Tricycle Use in El Salvador

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FOREWORD

El Salvador, a country with 5,5 million people and 21000 square kilometers of surface area is undergoing severe economic, social, ecologic and political problems. One of the numerous areas where the magnitud of these problems can be seen is the transportation system.

At the end of the 70's. El Saluador had an average of 20 cars and 6 commercial vehicles per 1000 inhabitants, and the country was spending one third of its import budget to pay for petroleum and transportation equipment. These expenses contributed to generate a heavy foreign debt which at the end of 1983 was above one billion dollars.

On the other hand the transportation investments inside the country have been oriented to promote the use of motorized vehicles, above all the private car. Most of the investments have been made in the urban areas especially the capital city, this originated a transportation system with a lot of problems and inconveniences such as the following:

1. It has been conceived and developed for a massive use of the private car
2. It is concentrated in the urban areas generating congestions and inefficencies
3. There is a lack of transportation facilities in the rural areas
4. It serves a small percentage of the Salvadorean population
5. It consumes a considerable amount of resources
6. It contributes to increase the foreign debt and the technical, economic and political dependency
7. It generates a lot of pollution in the cities
8. It contributes to stratify even more the Salvadorean society

These undesirable characteristics of the transportation system are due to some extent to the lack of creativity of the transportation planners, because they have always promoted the motorized transportation means when a good deal of the transportation needs could haue been satisfied with bicycles and tricycles as it is done in many countries in Europe and Asia.

To develop an appropriate transportation system in El Salvador lt is necessary that the transportation planners do not asses the transportation needs from the inside of a car but rather adopt a much wider perspective of analysis: otherwise the solutions devised will be oriented to satisfy the transportation needs of the car and not the transportation needs of the people.

The theoretical framework on which this program is based has been taken from a book entitled: Alternativas de transporte en Anerica Latina: La bicicleta y los triciclos. by Ricardo A. Navarro, Urs Heierli and Victor Beck. This 'reference book' can be obtained at SKAT Varnbüelstrasse 14, CH 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland.