## 3 Guadalajara Metropolitan Area and SITEUR  
The GMA is a conurbation in western Mexico with 4.8 million inhabitants spread over 2700 square kilometres. It is made up of nine municipalities: four central and five peripherals. An anarchic urbanization process and a metropolitan concentration has produced a scattered and fragmented city with a wide range of population density [32; 33]. Figure 1 illustrates that density is very high in the northwest and southwest urban areas, in addition to the central eastern area. With respect to socioeconomic characteristics, more than 15% of the GMA inhabitants live in high and very high levels of urban exclusion, and 40% of the inhabitants live in conditions of poverty [34; 35; 36]. The fact of not owning a refrigerator is an indicator of low household income, according to CONAPO [37]. Remarkably, 30.9% of households do not own a refrigerator in the GMA. The poorest people must allocate more than 35% of the total income to transport [38]. The mass public transport system (MPTS) in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area (GMA) is operated by the urban electric train system, known as SITEUR. It is a public institution created in 1987. By 1992, the SITEUR operated the first light rail transit (LRT) in the area, connecting the north and south of the city. The second LRT line started operation in 1994 and travelled from the centre to the east through the densest areas of the GMA. The MPTS was complemented by a line of bus rapid transit (BRT), known as the _Macrobis_ in 2006, running almost parallel to LRT Line 1 [10]. Then four lines with high quality buses, known as _Sitren_, were integrated into the system. Finally, a third line of the LRT was included in SITEUR by September 2020. The SITEUR promotes advancement for public transport systems in the GMA in terms of quality, security and reliability. Several more lines were contemplated in the metropolitan plans. In 2020, the construction of a second BRT line was started. It is aligned with a large avenue that links the central municipalities with those of the periphery. The improvement in the mobility within the city created by this line, will be assessed as soon as operational data is available. In general, SITEUR provides an improvement to the public transport system in the GMA in terms of quality and reliability. A study sponsored by UN-HABITAT refers to the good condition of vehicles, the attitude of the drivers and, in general, to the pleasant perception of the journey in SITEUR [39]. In addition, SITEUR's LRT lines contribute to good air quality, as they run on electricity and reduce trips by private motorized vehicles. Figure 1 shows a bus network service in the non-central areas of the GMA. There are also low-quality transport services such as motorcycle taxis, minibuses and other unregulated alternatives that are not still integrated into SITEUR [38]. Just as the highest population density is concentrated in the four central municipalities, almost 95% of the generators of journeys on work-days are also located in that area [40]. As illustrated in Figure 1, the three modes of SITEUR serve the urban area of these municipalities and the highest density areas, while the buses also serve the lowest density areas with microbuses and minivans. This kind of transport is slow, unreliable, and irregular [41]. Notwithstanding, they cover a lot of transport needs that are not reachable by SITEUR. While the modal split of GMA has not been recently assessed, government estimates are shown in Figure 2. A third of the daily journeys are made by public transport, while less than a third of them are made by private motorized vehicle and almost half of the trips  
Figure 1: Population Density in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area (inhab/sqkm). Source: Authors based on [42; 43]. are made by non-motorized vehicles [3]. From the 40% of non-motorized users, the 37% of the inhabitants who go by foot do so mainly for financial reasons [44].