COCHABAMBA’S UNMAPPED ENGINE: HOW INFORMAL TRANSIT DRIVES A CITY BUILT WITHOUT AN URBAN PLAN
LOCAL TEAM MEMBERS THAT WORKED ON MAPPING COCHABAMBA:
JUAN E. CABRERA is a professor at the Universidad Privada Boliviana (UPB) and Director of the Centro de Investigaciones en Arquitectura y Urbanismo (CIAU). He is also a professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
LUCAS MÉNDEZ is a civil engineer and member of the Centro de Investigación en Architecture and Urbanism (CIAU).
STEFANIE GAMARRA is an architect and researcher attached to the CIAU at UPB.
LEANDRO GANTIER is an urban planner and member of the CIAU group at UPB.
JUAN E. CABRERA is a professor at the Universidad Privada Boliviana (UPB) and Director of the Centro de Investigaciones en Arquitectura y Urbanismo (CIAU). He is also a professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
LUCAS MÉNDEZ is a civil engineer and member of the Centro de Investigación en Architecture and Urbanism (CIAU).
STEFANIE GAMARRA is an architect and researcher attached to the CIAU at UPB.
LEANDRO GANTIER is an urban planner and member of the CIAU group at UPB.
In Cochabamba, Bolivia, the buses rattle through the city’s arteries without official stops, schedules, or digital maps. Yet they never stop running. Whether you’re in the dense urban center or a hillside neighborhood with no paved roads, odds are a micro, coaster, or “trufi” will get you where you need to go. It’s chaotic. It’s loud. It’s deeply local. And it works.
“It’s not efficient, but it’s effective,” said Lucas Méndez, a civil engineer and member of the research collective CIAU (Center for Research in Architecture and Urbanism). “The buses go where even water or electricity can’t reach.”
But for years, no one had mapped it—until a group of researchers decided to do it themselves. What began as both an academic and deeply personal endeavor has grown into one of Latin America’s most comprehensive grassroots mobility mapping projects.
A LIVING, GROWING SYSTEM
Led by Professor Juan Cabrera, along with Lucas Méndez, Stefanie Gamarra, and Leandro Gantier, the project to map Cochabamba has today compiled more than 750 routes used by the city’s informal transport system—more than any official agency had ever documented.
“The routes grow every day,” Juan explains. “Tomorrow there will be another one, next week another. It’s that dynamic.”
Cochabamba is Bolivia’s fourth largest city, tucked into a valley between the Andes mountains and known for its spring-like weather and vibrant food markets. Its rapid expansion over the last few decades has far outpaced formal planning efforts, leaving a patchwork of urbanization stitched together by the movement of people.
Leandro recalls his daily journey to school fifteen years prior to the study. Where the 10–kilometer trip once took him past rolling fields, today it offers a zoetrope of home and business facades, highlighting a dramatic thickening of Cochabamba’s urban fabric. “What took just a few minutes back then now takes approximately an hour.”
The city’s decentralized transport web is powered not by a central authority, but by a network of cooperatives, unions, and syndicates that emerged as early as the 1950s—and expanded rapidly during the economic crises of the 1980s. These groups are not just transit providers: they are self-managed organizations that offer health care, education, and even political power to their members.
“Almost 50% of the population here has some connection to the transport sector,” Juan explains. “Directly or indirectly—it’s drivers, vendors, cleaners, families. The government may be weak, but these organizations are strong.”
FOUR WHEELS, NO FRILLS
For outsiders, the term “public transit” may conjure up images of sleek buses or metro lines.
But in Cochabamba, the backbone of mobility is a mishmash of modified vehicles: aging Chevrolet Dutras retrofitted with Nissan truck engines, micros that can carry up to 50 people, coasters for medium-length routes, and trufis—small shared vans that weave through narrow alleys and steep hillsides.
“They weren’t made for passengers,” Leandro said, laughing. “They were made to carry vegetables. But here, we’ve adapted them.”
The flexibility of these vehicles allows them to serve sprawling neighborhoods where formal buses can’t go. In fact, many new urban developments follow the routes, not the other way around.
“In Cochabamba, transit doesn’t follow the city—it shapes it,” Juan observes. “Informal transport is the main driver of urban sprawl.”
Land developers often collaborate—formally or not—with transport syndicates to establish routes that connect new settlements to the city center. Without this service, many neighborhoods would remain disconnected and undeveloped.
For many residents —students, domestic workers, market vendors, and rural commuters—informal transit isn’t just the easiest option, it’s the only one. A ride on a micro or trufi typically costs about 2.50 bolivianos (roughly $0.35 USD), making it one of the most accessible services in the city.
“It’s not efficient, but it’s effective,” said Lucas Méndez, a civil engineer and member of the research collective CIAU (Center for Research in Architecture and Urbanism). “The buses go where even water or electricity can’t reach.”
But for years, no one had mapped it—until a group of researchers decided to do it themselves. What began as both an academic and deeply personal endeavor has grown into one of Latin America’s most comprehensive grassroots mobility mapping projects.
A LIVING, GROWING SYSTEM
Led by Professor Juan Cabrera, along with Lucas Méndez, Stefanie Gamarra, and Leandro Gantier, the project to map Cochabamba has today compiled more than 750 routes used by the city’s informal transport system—more than any official agency had ever documented.
“The routes grow every day,” Juan explains. “Tomorrow there will be another one, next week another. It’s that dynamic.”
Cochabamba is Bolivia’s fourth largest city, tucked into a valley between the Andes mountains and known for its spring-like weather and vibrant food markets. Its rapid expansion over the last few decades has far outpaced formal planning efforts, leaving a patchwork of urbanization stitched together by the movement of people.
Leandro recalls his daily journey to school fifteen years prior to the study. Where the 10–kilometer trip once took him past rolling fields, today it offers a zoetrope of home and business facades, highlighting a dramatic thickening of Cochabamba’s urban fabric. “What took just a few minutes back then now takes approximately an hour.”
The city’s decentralized transport web is powered not by a central authority, but by a network of cooperatives, unions, and syndicates that emerged as early as the 1950s—and expanded rapidly during the economic crises of the 1980s. These groups are not just transit providers: they are self-managed organizations that offer health care, education, and even political power to their members.
“Almost 50% of the population here has some connection to the transport sector,” Juan explains. “Directly or indirectly—it’s drivers, vendors, cleaners, families. The government may be weak, but these organizations are strong.”
FOUR WHEELS, NO FRILLS
For outsiders, the term “public transit” may conjure up images of sleek buses or metro lines.
But in Cochabamba, the backbone of mobility is a mishmash of modified vehicles: aging Chevrolet Dutras retrofitted with Nissan truck engines, micros that can carry up to 50 people, coasters for medium-length routes, and trufis—small shared vans that weave through narrow alleys and steep hillsides.
“They weren’t made for passengers,” Leandro said, laughing. “They were made to carry vegetables. But here, we’ve adapted them.”
The flexibility of these vehicles allows them to serve sprawling neighborhoods where formal buses can’t go. In fact, many new urban developments follow the routes, not the other way around.
“In Cochabamba, transit doesn’t follow the city—it shapes it,” Juan observes. “Informal transport is the main driver of urban sprawl.”
Land developers often collaborate—formally or not—with transport syndicates to establish routes that connect new settlements to the city center. Without this service, many neighborhoods would remain disconnected and undeveloped.
For many residents —students, domestic workers, market vendors, and rural commuters—informal transit isn’t just the easiest option, it’s the only one. A ride on a micro or trufi typically costs about 2.50 bolivianos (roughly $0.35 USD), making it one of the most accessible services in the city.
A MOBILE APP THAT ALLOWED THE PUBLIC TO PLAN MOBILITY
The project unfolded in two phases. From 2017 to 2021, students from San Simón and UPB helped collect route data by riding buses, noting stops, and building a Geographic Information System (GIS). With no official data to start from, the team rode and mapped each route by hand, adding new ones as they emerged. After four years of tracking a constantly shifting system, their work culminated in a mobile app (Llajta Rutas) that quickly became an essential tool for residents navigating Cochabamba’s complex transit network.
“One of the most common things we heard was, ‘I don’t use public transport because I don’t know how,’” Lucas reports. “So the app became a way to change that.”
Llajta Rutas gained national attention, winning the Smart City Latin America Award in 2019. What began as a local project to help Cochabambans navigate their own city has since grown into a globally recognized, open-source platform for mapping informal transit systems and has been adapted for other cities across the Global South, including Accra, Medellín, and Addis Ababa.
The mobile app has even reportedly changed people’s commuting habits in Cochabamba. “Some people said they used their cars less,” Juan recalls proudly. “They left them at home, used the app, and made their trip by bus.”
The second phase of the project began in 2022 and is still ongoing, underscoring the dynamism of the routes. While the team has continued mapping routes—adding 200 more and bringing the total to nearly 700—they’ve also turned their attention to the social, economic, and territorial forces that shape Cochabamba’s informal transit system. The team studied how syndicates operate, how routes expand without formal oversight, and how transit affects urban sprawl, governance, and daily life. As Stefanie puts it, the goal is to “shed light on the system’s contribution and challenges” so that it can be better integrated into future transport policy.
DISTRUST, DYNAMISM, AND THE POLITICS OF SHARING
People often ask the data collectors why, if the system works so well, it hadn’t been mapped before? Their answer: distrust. “These buses are private enterprises competing with each other,” said Stefanie. “They don’t have any obligation to share information with the municipality.”
Convincing syndicates to collaborate required persistence, diplomacy, and no small amount of patience. “We had to meet with every member,” Lucas explained. “If even one person wasn’t there, we had to come back the next week and explain everything again.”
Eventually, the largest syndicate welcomed them in, recognizing the potential of the mapping team’s work. For Stefanie, that was a turning point: “They finally felt heard—and that made the difference.”
By building trust with Cochabamba’s sindicatos—insular unions that manage informal transit beyond state oversight—the team gained rare access to how the system actually works. These relationships revealed not just routes, but the economic drivers, governance structures, and territorial dynamics behind them. That insider knowledge proved essential to the project’s success.
A BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE?
Despite their success, the team faces ongoing hurdles. Funding is scarce. They dream of printing and distributing a physical map across the city, but so far, that remains out of reach. The state, they say, lacks both the will and the capacity to absorb this knowledge into urban policy.
“We always hear about BRT systems or new trains,” Juan says. “But those are dreams. The real change starts with studying what already exists.”
They see hope in examples from other cities in the Global South, like Nairobi, where informal transit has been incrementally integrated into public planning. Cochabamba could do the same—if it stops ignoring the system that already moves its people.
“There is no real transportation system here,” Leandro explains. “There is no coordinated logic. But with this data, we’ve taken the first step.”
The project unfolded in two phases. From 2017 to 2021, students from San Simón and UPB helped collect route data by riding buses, noting stops, and building a Geographic Information System (GIS). With no official data to start from, the team rode and mapped each route by hand, adding new ones as they emerged. After four years of tracking a constantly shifting system, their work culminated in a mobile app (Llajta Rutas) that quickly became an essential tool for residents navigating Cochabamba’s complex transit network.
“One of the most common things we heard was, ‘I don’t use public transport because I don’t know how,’” Lucas reports. “So the app became a way to change that.”
Llajta Rutas gained national attention, winning the Smart City Latin America Award in 2019. What began as a local project to help Cochabambans navigate their own city has since grown into a globally recognized, open-source platform for mapping informal transit systems and has been adapted for other cities across the Global South, including Accra, Medellín, and Addis Ababa.
The mobile app has even reportedly changed people’s commuting habits in Cochabamba. “Some people said they used their cars less,” Juan recalls proudly. “They left them at home, used the app, and made their trip by bus.”
The second phase of the project began in 2022 and is still ongoing, underscoring the dynamism of the routes. While the team has continued mapping routes—adding 200 more and bringing the total to nearly 700—they’ve also turned their attention to the social, economic, and territorial forces that shape Cochabamba’s informal transit system. The team studied how syndicates operate, how routes expand without formal oversight, and how transit affects urban sprawl, governance, and daily life. As Stefanie puts it, the goal is to “shed light on the system’s contribution and challenges” so that it can be better integrated into future transport policy.
DISTRUST, DYNAMISM, AND THE POLITICS OF SHARING
People often ask the data collectors why, if the system works so well, it hadn’t been mapped before? Their answer: distrust. “These buses are private enterprises competing with each other,” said Stefanie. “They don’t have any obligation to share information with the municipality.”
Convincing syndicates to collaborate required persistence, diplomacy, and no small amount of patience. “We had to meet with every member,” Lucas explained. “If even one person wasn’t there, we had to come back the next week and explain everything again.”
Eventually, the largest syndicate welcomed them in, recognizing the potential of the mapping team’s work. For Stefanie, that was a turning point: “They finally felt heard—and that made the difference.”
By building trust with Cochabamba’s sindicatos—insular unions that manage informal transit beyond state oversight—the team gained rare access to how the system actually works. These relationships revealed not just routes, but the economic drivers, governance structures, and territorial dynamics behind them. That insider knowledge proved essential to the project’s success.
A BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE?
Despite their success, the team faces ongoing hurdles. Funding is scarce. They dream of printing and distributing a physical map across the city, but so far, that remains out of reach. The state, they say, lacks both the will and the capacity to absorb this knowledge into urban policy.
“We always hear about BRT systems or new trains,” Juan says. “But those are dreams. The real change starts with studying what already exists.”
They see hope in examples from other cities in the Global South, like Nairobi, where informal transit has been incrementally integrated into public planning. Cochabamba could do the same—if it stops ignoring the system that already moves its people.
“There is no real transportation system here,” Leandro explains. “There is no coordinated logic. But with this data, we’ve taken the first step.”