Mobilidade e acessibilidade em pequenas cidades: proposições para a inclusão dos pequenos municípios na elaboração dos planos de mobilidade urbana

Abstract

The urban planning in Brazil and its actions has put a significant portion of municipalities away from the public policies. Since the Federal Constitution (CF 1988), the restriction on the obligation to elaborate instruments of urban management, has contemplated only the municipalities with more than twenty thousand inhabitants. In the sequence, the Statute of Cities and the Master Plans regulated the Article 182 of the Federal Constitution and were reinforced by Law 12,587/2012, which provides a new and important mechanism for the management of cities in the field of urban mobility, justifying again the obligation of that group of municipalities to draw up Mobility Plans. From this analysis, it was remarked that the small municipalities, with less than twenty thousand inhabitants, have always been disregarded of the public policies even though they have a significant index of disabled and elderly people in their population universe. These people are part of a group considered to have reduced mobility and they also require accessibility and mobility conditions, such as people from the middle and large municipalities. From this perspective, this research has carried out a survey of the number of disabled and elderly people in all municipalities of the Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaíba, in order to verify the representativeness of these two categories. The urban area of three small municipalities, with population below 20,000 thousand inhabitants, was defined to verify the level of accessibility through accessibility instruments established by NBR 9050:2015, creating indexes classified as accessible, partially accessible and not accessible, from the analysis of public sites and sectors in the small cities of Estrela do Sul, Romaria and Indianópolis. Once analyzed the accessibility indexes and the number of disabled and elderly people, the conclusion was that it is necessary to include the small cities in urban public policies, especially due to the demands presented in the fieldwork and because of the right to the city guaranteed for all citizens, independently of the place where he lives, involving all aspects of accessibility, citizenship and autonomy in the displacements, either on foot, by bicycle or by any other non-motorized kind of transport. The population restriction for the participation of cities in the urban policies also presupposes the restriction of the right to the city for citizens living in municipalities with less than twenty thousand inhabitants, since they are always on the margins of the urban management instruments. The small city can and should be inclusive, and included in public policies through the revision of the legislation or specific programs destined to the gradual promotion of accessibility and mobility. It is possible to restructure the small cities through the application of the technical norms and the parameters of the universal design, making them accessible and more humanized.