Special Report: The coming transport revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean (ISSN 17414474)

How the transport revolution will affect Latin America’s cities – home to 80% of the total population – is perhaps one of the most important and yet, at the same time, one of the most hard-to-predict issues. What is clear is that the changes in transport will add to, and interact with, other significant changes that are already under way. One of these is that the regional population is beginning to age. The middle class is larger, birth rates have dropped, and life expectancy has increased. The profile of the population is changing with the median age pushing up, implying big changes in the allocation of resources. Demographic experts suggest that the population of some key cities will peak, and then start falling. The population of Mexico City, for example, is expected to peak around 2050 and then to begin contracting. There will be more elderly people than before, and the dependency ratio (those of working age as a proportion of the total population) will deteriorate.