Public transport and depopulation in rural areas: the case of the Castellón interior

Abstract

In recent years, the problem of rural depopulation has become topical. This has led many towns to its effective disappearance. Among those that still survive, some suffer a progressive reduction of public services and endowments like the bus transport, that plays an important role. This ends up forcing many residents to migrate to more populated areas to have access to basic services. This work aims to document and confirm the gradual disappearance and / or decrease of the bus service in the interior of the province of Castellón and show the existing alternatives to revert or mitigate this exodus from sustainable proposals to ensure a fair quality of life in all territories. For this analysis, a reconstruction of the demographic evolution and the offer of existing bus services in the province has been carried out, from various statistical sources from the National Statistical Institute and the regional council, while the proposals are inspired or supported by the existing bibliography on transportation in rural areas. The results confirm the decrease in the transport service in parallel to the depopulation in many areas, without any of the existing measures having been applied to guarantee its efficiency and sustainability.

Keywords

• autobús
• medio rural
• equidad territorial
• éxodo rural.