# Methodology to Assess Sustainable Mobility in LATAM Cities
## 1 Introduction  
Industrialization and globalization have triggered people to migrate from the country-side to urban areas. Cities, in response to the pulsating demands for new places to live, expand their area horizontally, creating what is known as urban sprawl. As a consequence, citizens are traveling large distances in their daily life activities, causing problems of transport and traffic. Therefore, there is an urgent need for governments to assess mobility in their cities as a preliminary step to identify the high-impact mobility strategies they need to implement in the short and medium term. Urban areas are wide regions with complex issues related to individual, collective, and freight mobility. The continuous urban growth around the globe in the last few decades has provoked widespread urban growth with alarming rates of growth rates in the vehicle fleet and their environmental impact [1]. The use of vehicles becomes a problem when meeting air quality standards in urban areas since polluting emissions increase significantly in such places with the number of vehicles and traffic [2]. Consequently, the mobility concept has changed to a sustainable urban mobility concept. Mobility is the ability to move freely. In the context of urban regions, sustainable mobility is the ability of a transport system to meet the needs of its citizens and goods of gaining access to desired locations, with the minimum environmental impact, minimum cost, and means well accepted by the community. This means that mobility is no longer based on the distances and attraction nodes classical model [3]. Now, it is the ability to meet the needs of society to move freely. gain extensive access to desired locations, communicate, negotiate, and make relationships without sacrificing other values, today or in the future [4]. Furthermore, the sustainable mobility concept has advanced to the smart mobility concept, along with the concepts of smart city [5], where authorities optimize planning processes and improve the outcomes of those plans, based on the knowledge gained from dynamic data and information gathered in the cloud from large networks of low-cost sensors (monitoring technologies that after a few years have become accessible to the cities at low cost). Evidence-based planning seeks to ensure that planned activities are linked to final outcomes where the best available data, information, and knowledge are used to make decisions. Obtaining scientific evidence to measure the performance of cities as well as to support monitoring and evaluation in certain areas is essential when planning interventions. These evaluations not only allow for an assessment of the current situation but also to measure whether the measures taken have been successful. Aiming to achieve the previous objective, several efforts have been made to develop methods to evaluate the status of urban mobility in several cities around the globe. Table 1 lists the most relevant and recent studies focused on evaluating urban mobility. Although many of these studies claim to have included a substantial number of cities around the world, most of these studies were developed in European, Asian, and North American cities. In few cases, they included Latin American (LATAM) megacities such as Mexico City and Lima. _Methodologies to assess urban mobility:_ Based on the previous literature review, Table 2 includes eight methodologies to evaluate urban mobility in cities developed by governmental organizations and private companies, all of them based on the use of performance indicators. Some European organizations, such as the Fraunhofer Society, formed the Morgenstadt Innovation Network and developed a methodology called City Labs that combines quantitative and qualitative assessments. They recognize the city as an extensive complex system and perform a tailored, smart city assessment that includes the following key sectors: energy, mobility, information and communication technologies (ICT), buildings, production and logistics, security, governance, and water infrastructure.