Vernacular governmentality: the last mile, temporal certainty, and risk-sensitive integration of informal shared taxis in metropolitan Lima

1 Introduction

Metropolitan Lima is characterized by long journeys, peripheral expansion, uneven formal coverage, and costly first- and last-mile connections. Within this mobility landscape, colectivos are small passenger vehicles—commonly sedans, station wagons, and, in some corridors, minivans—that carry several passengers along recurrent but adaptable routes. They typically operate from recognizable street corners or moving boarding points and may display printed or improvised destination signs. Users value their directness, shorter waiting and transfer times, and proximity to places that conventional services reach irregularly or only after a substantial walk.

The colectivos examined in this study differ from ride-hailing platforms and formally authorized demand-responsive transport. They are primarily street-based shared services. Digital tools such as WhatsApp may support coordination among drivers, but an application does not define the service. Their legal position in Lima is also distinct from the temporary national regime for passenger transport in M1 vehicles. Law No. 31096 and Supreme Decree No. 003-2022-MTC exclude Metropolitan Lima and Callao, where urban passenger services remain subject to the general transport framework and authorization by the Urban Transport Authority for Lima and Callao (ATU) (Congreso de la República del Perú, 1999, 2018, 2020; Ministerio de Transportes y Comunicaciones, 2009, 2022).

The persistence of these services raises a governance question: how is mobility organized when formal institutions are present but incomplete and experienced unevenly? Governmentality scholarship has focused mainly on state, administrative, and corporate rationalities, while mobilities research has emphasized speed, access, motility, and mobility justice. The Lima case highlights temporal certainty, understood here as the practical reliability of reaching a destination within a socially usable time window. Recent research also shows that informal transport networks respond to labor organization and demand geographies rather than operating randomly (Kerzhner, 2023, 2024; Mittal et al., 2024; Gadepalli et al., 2024).

The article examines how users, drivers, and authorities negotiate temporal certainty, proximity, legitimacy, and regulatory control around colectivos in Metropolitan Lima, and under what conditions a risk- and territory-sensitive form of integration could improve last-mile access and road safety without reproducing existing inequalities. The analysis connects the empirical findings with governmentality and mobilities scholarship to explore temporal certainty as a governed mobility resource, the role of informal route knowledge in producing mobile moorings and vernacular motility capital, and the regulatory implications of these practices.

2 From state rationality to vernacular governmentality

2.1 The Foucauldian canon and its limits

Foucault defined governmentality as the “conduct of conduct”: the ensemble of institutions, calculations, procedures, tactics, and forms of knowledge through which populations are made governable (Foucault, 2007). The existing canon, spanning studies of liberal and advanced liberal governmentality to applications in urban management and transport governance, has concentrated overwhelmingly on the state, corporate actors, or institutional apparatuses as the primary sites where governmental rationality is produced and applied (Rose, 1999; Dean, 2010). Even research that focuses on informality often frames informal activity as either a failure of state reach or an attempt to pull ungoverned spaces back into official regulatory logics (Sunio et al., 2021; Lemke, 2001). What Lima’s colectivos illustrate is something different. Drivers and users are not simply resisting a state governmentality of order, safety, and legality. They are establishing their own governmental rationality, organized around temporal certainty rather than legal compliance: a distinct form of conducting conduct brought into being by the frictions of the formal system.

The existing theoretical toolkit gets us partway there but then stalls. Foucault’s notion of counter-conducts helps identify the resistive dimension of these practices, and the defensive repertoires of colectivo drivers carry that charge (Foucault, 2007). However, the primary work of drivers and users is productive rather than merely oppositional: they maintain a functioning mobility system, not just an obstruction to the formal one. Scott’s concept of hidden transcripts similarly presupposes a reactive relationship to domination, while VG is more accurately described as a standing administration that happens to be unauthorized (Scott, 1990; Roy, 2009). The notion of heterotopia is useful for marking the spatial otherness of informal networks, but it cannot fulfill what the Lima case demands (Foucault, 1986). It identifies alternative sites of ordering without explaining how that ordering holds together over time, how it is legitimized, and through what mechanisms it adapts under pressure.

Heterotopia and VG therefore differ on two levels. First, heterotopia is a site: a place one can enter and depart. VG, by contrast, has no stable location because it is dispersed across mobile devices, shifting street corners, route knowledge, and time slots that vary with enforcement calendars. Second, while heterotopia denotes a space in which alternative relations are enacted, VG examines how those relations sustain themselves as a form of government. This distinction matters because there is no colectivo heterotopia to map or enclose. There is only a set of practices distributed across the city, continuously reconstructing itself under pressure.

The literature on urban informality has been pushing in this direction for some time. Roy and Simone have argued, from different vantage points, that the informal city is not a degraded version of the formal one but a distinct mode of urban practice with its own rationalities, forms of knowledge, and material supports (Roy, 2009; Simone, 2004). Simone’s concept of “people as infrastructure”—the idea that in many Global South cities, residents themselves become the connective tissue holding urban life together—corresponds closely to what we observe in Lima (Simone, 2004). Colectivo networks, with their WhatsApp-coordinated route adjustments, accumulated corridor knowledge, informal norms about driver conduct, and rapid adaptation to enforcement, serve as human infrastructure in precisely this sense. VG is the governmental dimension of that human infrastructure: the norms, calculations, and practical judgments through which it keeps running.

One further contrast with heterotopia is worth noting. Heterotopia posits alterity to the dominant spatial order: the heterotopic site stands apart from, and in uneasy dialogue with, the normative spaces surrounding it. VG posits friction. Enforcement operations do not encounter this informal system as an external other; they provoke it, reshape it, and are in turn anticipated by it. Each crackdown reconfigures VG, and each reconfiguration reflects the pressure that produced it. Formal and vernacular governmentalities are therefore locked in a constitutive relation, each shaped by the other’s moves.

In this sense, governmentality in informal contexts should not be understood as chaos, but as a ‘biopolitics from below.’ Here, control of time does not stem from an official schedule, but from a constant negotiation between the need for movement and the risk of uncertainty. This article expands on Foucault’s thesis by demonstrating that, in Lima, order is a vernacular product generated by the mobile population itself.

2.2 A governmentality lens on mobility and temporal certainty

Foucault theorized the governance of circulation through security apparatuses and risk thresholds: the calibration of acceptable harm, the management of flows, and the statistical normalization of populations (Foucault, 2007, 1977). What his framework leaves underspecified, and what mobilities scholarship has not fully addressed, is temporal certainty as a distinct governed object. Temporal certainty is not simply the freedom to move, nor the speed at which one moves, but the reliability of arrival. Urban governmentality work tends to focus on zoning, surveillance, policing, or smart city logistics, while mobilities research examines speed, access, and the unequal distribution of movement capacities (Urry, 2007; Sheller and Urry, 2006). The Lima case highlights another issue: the governance of whether journeys end where and when they are supposed to.

Governance of circulation, in this framework, appears not only in transport legislation but also in the spatial design of corridors, the allocation of sanction costs, and the thresholds at which informal services shift from tolerated to prosecuted (Rojas Usma, 2015; Cresswell, 2010). Users and drivers respond through adaptive routing, community alerts, informal safety norms, and situated judgments about enforcement risk. These practices push against the regulatory order without always breaking it in ways that prompt a decisive response. The informal sector is also internally heterogeneous, with variable degrees of state oversight, organizational form, territorial embeddedness, and labor precarity. Standard regulatory approaches that target informality as a uniform object therefore consistently fail because the object itself is anything but uniform (Behrens et al., 2021).

The right to sustainable mobility, gradually consolidating in legal and policy frameworks that connect transport access to broader guarantees of inclusion, safety, and urban citizenship, provides one normative anchor for this analysis (Reynoso et al., 2023). Yet the same frameworks that proclaim that right also deploy technologies of power: they regulate circulation, set thresholds of acceptability, and define who counts as a legitimate urban subject. The point is not to dismiss the normative aspiration of sustainable mobility, but to track the gap between what those frameworks promise and what the governance of daily mobility in Lima’s periphery actually looks like. That gap is wide enough to render techno-developmentalist framings of informality as mere regulatory nuisance conceptually insufficient (Carmona Rojas, 2020; Sunio et al., 2021).

Temporal certainty matters because it is the everyday unit through which peripheral residents experience mobility inequality. A formal route may exist on paper, and a corridor may appear on an institutional map, but if waiting times are unpredictable, transfer penalties are high, boarding points are crowded or unsafe, and the last mile requires walking uphill through poorly lit streets, formal access becomes functionally incomplete. Colectivos respond to this incompleteness not by abolishing risk, but by redistributing it. They reduce waiting and transfer uncertainty for passengers while producing other costs: road safety risks, improvised boarding points, competition with formal operators, and exposure to punitive enforcement. VG is located within this trade-off. It governs the acceptable distribution of temporal outcomes under conditions of structural deficit, using instruments that are social, practical, and distributed rather than legal or bureaucratic.

2.3 Rhizomatic governance: Deleuze, Guattari, and informal coordination

If heterotopia is insufficient to describe the spatial character of VG, the rhizome, as developed by Deleuze and Guattari, is more adequate for one specific dimension: the organizational logic through which VG maintains itself and adapts under pressure (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Against arboreal models of organization based on hierarchy, traceable genealogy, and branching from a fixed center, the rhizome proceeds through connection and heterogeneity. Any node can link to any other regardless of type; the structure has no organizing pivot, only dimensions in motion; when severed, it reconstitutes through alternative lines rather than collapsing; and it maps actual territory rather than tracing a prescribed plan. Colectivo coordination networks display these properties in ways that have consistent and significant governance implications.

The most practically significant of these properties is what Deleuze and Guattari call asignifying rupture: the capacity to reconstitute after a break rather than collapse from it (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). A police operation that shuts down a colectivo corridor does not disable the network. Within minutes, new WhatsApp subgroups form, secondary routes activate, departure windows shift, and informal departure points relocate. Each crackdown generates evasion, and each evasion generates new lines of coordination. Formalization schemes premised on a decisive registration moment, such as one decree, one compliance campaign, or one route registry, are built on a mistaken understanding of the system. They assume a center that can pull the rest into compliance once captured, but the colectivo network does not have that center.

Heterogeneous connection accounts for something equally important: the organizational promiscuity that makes the network hard to govern by conventional means. Driver, passenger, intersection, police shift schedule, WhatsApp broadcast, unlit corner, roadblock, fare expectation, and neighborhood rumor can all operate as active nodes in the same informal governance network, even though they belong to entirely different ontological registers. De Certeau described the tactics of everyday life as operating through the cracks of proprietary power (de Certeau, 1984). The rhizome concept extends that observation by emphasizing that the exploitation of those cracks is not merely individual opportunism but systematically networked practice. That networked quality is what gives VG its durability.

The cartographic principle, “make a map, not a tracing,” illustrates the gap between formal and vernacular knowledge (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Official route planning relies on traces: fixed corridors, designated stops, concession boundaries, and enforcement zones that define legal movement. Colectivo networks map actual demand, including who needs to move, from where, at what time, where enforcement is lighter, and where passengers are likely to wait. Planning agencies produce aggregated route maps that abstract from this granularity. Drivers continuously generate mobility knowledge that is spatially specific and temporally sensitive. From the perspective of governing actual movement rather than merely administering formal compliance, this represents a rational form of knowledge.

The governance implications pose challenges for standard integration models. A scheme that inserts a central coordinating node, such as a single application, route authority, or compliance platform, into a rhizomatic structure may create a target that the network can navigate around. Regulators should therefore consider how to engage with existing coordination, use informal route knowledge as evidence for feeder-route design, and focus enforcement on documented harm rather than solely on administrative non-compliance.

2.4 The government of mobilities from below

The mobilities turn has reorganized social science around a fundamental premise: the mobilities of people, goods, images, information, and capital are constitutive of social life (Urry, 2007). The research program that followed produced extensive work on the politics of movement, the social experience of transit, and the unequal distribution of motility, understood as the capacity for mobility as a form of social capital (Kaufmann et al., 2004). Less attention has been paid to governance from below: the unofficial rationalities, informal norms, and distributed coordination through which populations create access when formal systems are insufficient. VG is an answer to that question developed through the Lima case.

The difficulty within the mobilities paradigm is partly conceptual. Governance of mobility tends to appear in the literature at the level of infrastructure, corporate logistics, state planning, or smart city technologies. Cresswell’s foundational work on the politics of mobility asks who controls movement, who is stopped, and who benefits (Cresswell, 2010). The Lima case adds a prior question: who produces the reliability of movement when formal infrastructure cannot? And through what organizational rationalities does that production occur? These are questions the paradigm has not yet fully assembled its resources to answer—not because those resources are unavailable, but because the problem has not always been formulated clearly enough to make them recognizable as relevant.

The mobilities paradigm has theorized speed extensively, including the politics of fast and slow movement, the forms of mobility that structure contemporary life, and access as a dimension of mobility justice (Urry, 2007; Sheller, 2018; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Carmona Rojas, 2020). Arrival reliability is different. Users in Lima’s peripheral corridors do not choose colectivos solely because the vehicles may be faster. They also choose them because a colectivo departing from a familiar corner may provide a more predictable connection than a bus with an irregular headway. Temporal certainty refers to this reliability and to the informal coordination required to produce it.

Hannam, Sheller, and Urry argued that mobilities depend on moorings: social and physical anchors that enable movement (Hannam et al., 2006). These moorings are often infrastructural, such as bus stops, stations, official corridors, terminals, and networked platforms. In Lima’s informal transport corridors, designated stops and official corridors can also become enforcement sites. Informal systems instead rely on provisional social anchors, including drivers’ knowledge, familiar waiting points, and communication about route conditions. These mobile moorings are social rather than fixed, temporary rather than permanent, and collectively rather than institutionally produced.

Kaufmann et al. (2004) conceptualize motility as the capacity for mobility: the skills, access conditions, and appropriation strategies that determine whether movement can be realized. The Lima data extend this framework by showing that access to informal governance networks, route knowledge, digital alerts, and experience with transfers can function as vernacular motility capital. This capital is produced socially and distributed unequally. Newcomers, infrequent users, older passengers with limited access to digital channels, and people without ties to existing colectivo networks may be disadvantaged. Mobility deficits, therefore, cannot be assessed from income data and transport maps alone.

Sheller’s mobility justice framework argues that safe, affordable, and dignified movement has been systematically denied to low-income and geographically peripheral populations by the design of formal transport systems (Sheller, 2018). The Lima colectivo network complicates this account without refuting it. Informal services respond to temporal needs that formal services often fail to meet, but they may also reproduce road risk, labor precarity, and unequal access to information. A mobility justice framework adequate to Lima must therefore recognize both the practical contributions and the harms of informal governance.

2.5 Conceptual contribution: vernacular governmentality

Bringing these strands together, VG can be defined as a form of distributed, non-state, and situated governmentality through which actors in contexts of selective institutional presence produce order, access, and predictability by means of informal norms, practical calculations, territorial knowledge, and adaptive coordination. It is “vernacular” not because it is primitive or merely local, but because it is produced in the everyday language of practice: fares, corners, routes, warnings, reputations, waiting times, enforcement rumors, and judgments about acceptable harm. It is governmental because it conducts conduct: it shapes how drivers decide when to depart, how passengers decide where to wait, how routes adjust to risk, and how legitimacy is distinguished from abuse.

VG differs from informality as a descriptive category. Informality refers to a position relative to law or regulation, while VG denotes a mode of governance that can emerge within informality but is not reducible to illegality. It also differs from criminal governance, which often relies on coercion, extortion, territorial domination, or monopolization of violence. VG, as observed in the colectivo system, operates through usefulness, legitimacy, reciprocal dependence, and the everyday production of reliability. This does not mean it is benign; it can reproduce road risks, labor precarity, gendered insecurity, and unequal access to informal knowledge. However, its organizing mechanism is not violence. Its basic promise is temporal certainty.

The concept also reframes the regulatory problem. If colectivos are interpreted only as illegal operators, the policy response is enforcement. If they are seen solely as market responses to unmet demand, the response is formalization through licensing. Interpreting them as a vernacular governmentality instead highlights how formal regulation can preserve useful functions, such as last-mile proximity, flexible routing, and temporal certainty, while addressing safety externalities, labor protections, accountability, and unequal access.

This theoretical framework therefore offers three contributions. First, it extends governmentality theory to contexts of uneven institutionalization by showing how non-state actors administer collective life when formal authority is selective, intermittent, or distrusted. Second, it enhances mobilities theory by identifying temporal certainty as a governed resource distinct from speed, access, or motility alone. Third, it introduces vernacular motility capital and mobile moorings as concepts for understanding how informal networks facilitate access to the city through social, digital, and territorial infrastructures. Together, these concepts allow us to view Lima’s colectivos not as a residual anomaly awaiting correction, but as a practical system of governance whose risks and capacities must be understood before any serious integration can be attempted.

3 The Lima case: informal shared taxis in metropolitan Lima

3.1 Institutional fragmentation and the legacy of deregulation

Metropolitan Lima is a revealing case because public transport has been shaped by deregulation, overlapping operators, uneven territorial coverage, and fragmented authority. Reforms since the 1990s expanded supply but did not produce a fully integrated metropolitan network. The creation of the ATU through Law No. 30900 established a single metropolitan authority; however, implementation gaps remain, and everyday mobility continues to combine mass transit, conventional buses, smaller vehicles, taxis, walking, and informal services (Dammert-Guardia, 2021; Congreso de la República del Perú, 2018).

Available citywide indicators show continued dependence on fragmented road-based services and widespread dissatisfaction with public transport. In the 2023 Lima Cómo Vamos survey, 34.4% of respondents reported using combis or coasters for work or study trips, and 60.9% reported dissatisfaction with public transport overall (Lima Cómo Vamos, 2024). These figures describe the broader mobility context and do not estimate colectivo use.

No official citywide registry or methodologically defensible estimate of unlicensed colectivos or their drivers in Lima and Callao was identified. Because the service is unauthorized, route-adaptive, and documented mainly through localized studies or enforcement events, the article does not present a total for the metropolitan fleet or its drivers.

Taken together, these indicators describe a structurally incomplete system rather than a marginal anomaly. Colectivos persist where formal services are distant, irregular, overcrowded, poorly connected, or unable to provide a predictable final connection. Their feeder function does not eliminate congestion, safety, labor, or accountability concerns; it explains why punitive intervention alone may displace demand without resolving it.

3.2 Colectivos as last-mile and feeder mobility

In Metropolitan Lima, colectivos typically operate with small passenger vehicles, including sedans, station wagons, and in some locations, minivans, carrying unrelated passengers along recurrent but adjustable corridors. Vehicles may use windshield or window signs, verbal destination calls, digital messages, or repeated street presence to communicate the route. Fares are generally higher than conventional buses and lower than an individual taxi, positioning the service between mass transit and private hire.

Their role is frequently connective. Colectivos link neighborhoods, intermediate avenues, employment areas, commercial nodes, and trunk services, reducing long walks, uncertain headways, and transfer penalties. The relevant last mile is not necessarily a short distance; it is the segment in which formal access becomes practically incomplete because the traveler cannot reach a stop safely, predict when a vehicle will arrive, or complete the trip without multiple transfers.

The author-provided photograph in Figure 1 illustrates roadside barriers and curbside conditions associated with the street environment discussed in the study. It is included only as contextual material and was not analyzed as part of the interview corpus.

Colectivos therefore redistribute rather than eliminate risk. They may reduce waiting, walking, and transfer uncertainty while generating congestion, unsafe boarding, route improvisation, limited traceability, competition with authorized operators, and precarious working conditions. This trade-off is central to the concept of vernacular governmentality: practical order is produced through local knowledge, repeated interactions, route adaptation, and informal communication, but without the guarantees attached to public authorization.

Recent international research supports treating informal networks as organized mobility systems rather than random deviations. Comparative studies show that route formation reflects labor organization, demand geography, and collective decision-making, while network analyses identify consistent self-organizing structures across cities (Kerzhner, 2023; Mittal et al., 2024). The Lima case adds insights into the governance of arrival reliability and the legal friction created by selective enforcement.

3.3 Legal status, enforcement, and public protection

The applicable legal framework begins with Law No. 27181, which establishes the general organization, authorization, supervision, and safety principles for land transport, and Law No. 30900, which created the ATU as the competent metropolitan authority for Lima and Callao. The National Regulation of Transport Administration, approved by Supreme Decree No. 017-2009-MTC and subsequent amendments, requires authorization and compliance with vehicle, driver, insurance, and technical conditions for passenger service. These rules mean that social usefulness does not itself confer legal authorization (Congreso de la República del Perú, 1999, 2018; Ministerio de Transportes y Comunicaciones, 2009).

Law No. 31096 is often invoked in public debate as a legal basis for automobile colectivos, but its territorial scope is decisive. The statute and Supreme Decree No. 003-2022-MTC exclude Metropolitan Lima and Callao. Therefore, the temporary national regime cannot be used to characterize the services studied here as authorized feeders. The object of study is also not an information-technology-based platform service, although some operators use messaging applications to coordinate routes or enforcement alerts (Congreso de la República del Perú, 2020; Ministerio de Transportes y Comunicaciones, 2022).

From the perspective of passengers, the legal issue extends beyond administrative permission. Authorization, driver licensing, vehicle inspection, SOAT coverage, traceability, and accessible complaint channels are mechanisms for safety, legal certainty, and consumer protection. However, from the perspective of drivers, abrupt sanctions and impoundment can threaten livelihoods when no lawful transition pathway or replacement service is available. A complete legal analysis must therefore distinguish three questions: whether the service is authorized, what concrete harms or safety deficits are documented, and what public obligations arise from persistent unmet mobility demand.

Participant accounts of fines are treated as perceptions of regulatory pressure, not as statements of the current statutory tariff. Quoted amounts may combine different infractions, accumulated penalties, impoundment costs, or earlier UIT values. The article therefore does not convert these narratives into official statistics. Their analytical relevance lies in how the risk of sanctions shapes route changes, concealment, communication, and the moral interpretation of enforcement.

The regulatory contradiction is thus practical rather than doctrinal: unauthorized services fill documented access gaps, while the mechanisms used to suppress them may intensify route instability and unsafe boarding. This does not justify tolerance without standards; it identifies the need for a transition architecture that integrates access, safety, accountability, and proportionality.

3.4 Implications for risk-sensitive integration

Risk-sensitive integration starts by separating beneficial mobility functions from harmful operating practices. The state should identify corridors in which formal coverage is weak, transfers are burdensome, walking conditions are unsafe, and demand for direct connections is persistent. Time-limited feeder pilots could then be evaluated against transparent indicators: travel-time reliability, crash and incident reports, boarding safety, insurance and licensing compliance, passenger complaints, fare transparency, and effects on authorized services.

A feasible pilot would require visible driver and vehicle identification, verified licenses and technical inspections, SOAT coverage, designated boarding points, route or service-area limits, basic digital or administrative traceability, a complaint and incident channel, and graduated sanctions focused on documented harm. ATU should lead metropolitan authorization and oversight, coordinate road-safety and enforcement functions with the relevant authorities, and publish evaluation results. Driver or operator associations could support compliance and communication without replacing public accountability.

Integration should not be understood as blanket legalization. It is a staged regulatory test that preserves flexibility only where it serves a verified feeder function and withdraws permission when operators fail to meet safety, labor, or accountability conditions. The aim is to replace the unstable binary of repression versus tolerance with an auditable pathway from informal usefulness to conditional public responsibility.

4 Materials and methods

4.1 Research design and socio-legal approach

This study used an interpretive qualitative socio-legal case design. Its primary purpose was theory-building: to identify the practical rationalities, moral evaluations, and adaptive arrangements through which passengers, drivers, and institutional actors navigate colectivos in Metropolitan Lima. The study did not test prevalence or causal effects and makes no claim of statistical representativeness. A constructivist orientation guided attention to how legality, usefulness, safety, livelihood, and legitimacy are produced in participants’ accounts (Creswell and Poth, 2018).

The legal component was used to establish the regulatory status of the service and interpret the gap between formal rules and street-level practice. It combined conceptual analysis with an analysis of statutory and administrative documents, including legislation, regulations, official plans, and enforcement materials. Judicial decisions were not compiled as a separate empirical corpus, and international comparison was limited to peer-reviewed scholarship used to contextualize governance and integration options. The word cloud (Figure 2) and Sankey diagram (Figure 3) were treated as heuristic visualizations of lexical prominence and code relationships, not as inferential statistics or causal models.

4.2 Research setting and case context

The study was conducted in Metropolitan Lima, where formal mass transit and authorized road services coexist with informal and semi-formal arrangements. The research setting was defined analytically rather than by a single route: interviews addressed corridors and mobility situations characterized by long walks to formal transport, uncertain waiting times, multiple transfers, unsafe pedestrian access, or recurrent dependence on informal links.

For this study, last-mile access denotes the initial or terminal connection between a traveler’s origin or destination and a more consolidated transport corridor or service. It includes spatial distance and temporal, safety, and transfer frictions. The 800-meter threshold used during recruitment functioned as a practical screening prompt, not as a universal standard or measured exposure for every participant.

Figure 1 presents an unedited author photograph as contextual material. The image was not used as participant data or as a systematic observation of route prevalence, boarding behavior, or service performance.

4.3 Participants and sampling strategy

The empirical corpus comprised 25 semi-structured interviews: 12 passengers/users, 9 colectivo drivers or operators, and 4 institutional actors connected to transport regulation, enforcement, or public order. Maximum-variation purposive sampling was complemented by snowball recruitment when access was difficult. Variation by actor role and mobility position was prioritized over numerical representativeness.

Passengers provided demand-side accounts of proximity, waiting, transfers, cost–time trade-offs, and perceived safety. Drivers shared insights on route organization, communication, enforcement, income instability, and work-based legitimacy. Institutional actors offered legal, operational, and road-safety perspectives. Contrasting these viewpoints supported triangulation and prevented any one actor group from defining the system unchallenged.

Participants were adults. Passengers had used colectivos in Lima at least twice during the previous 6 months for routine mobility; drivers had at least 1 year of operating or coordinating experience; institutional actors had professional or operational experience in transport, enforcement, public order, or road safety. Participation required informed consent and the ability to discuss the topic without compromising safety or confidentiality.

Recruitment concluded when the main interpretive themes—temporal certainty, last-mile access, enforcement risk, moral legitimacy, informal coordination, and selective state presence—were recurring across actor groups, and later interviews refined negative or ambivalent cases without substantially altering the category structure. Saturation is therefore claimed at the level of the study’s analytical categories, not at the level of every route or subgroup in Lima.

Table 1 summarizes the composition of the interview corpus. All participants were adults. Age and gender were not used for analytical comparison and were not systematically retained in the de-identified analytic dataset; these characteristics are therefore not reconstructed as sample statistics. Participant identifiers are P1-P12 for passengers/users, D1-D9 for drivers/operators, and IA1-IA4 for institutional actors.

Table 1. Structure of the interview corpus.

Counts describe the qualitative corpus and are not population estimates. All participants were adults. Age and gender were not systematically retained in the de-identified analytic dataset and are therefore not reported as sample distributions.

4.4 Primary and secondary data collection

Primary data consisted of semi-structured interviews conducted in person or through secure remote communication, depending on participant availability and safety. The guide covered everyday mobility trajectories, reasons for using or providing colectivos, formal alternatives, enforcement experiences, safety, livelihood, and expectations regarding regulation or integration.

With consent, interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, reviewed for accuracy, and de-identified. Field notes documented contextual impressions and recruitment or interaction conditions; they supported interpretation but were not treated as independent observations of route prevalence or performance.

Secondary data consisted of legislation, regulations, official plans and investment documents, ATU enforcement communications, public-interest reports with stated methods, and peer-reviewed scholarship. The documentary review was used to verify territorial scope, authorization requirements, institutional responsibilities, system indicators, and the distinction between official evidence and participant perceptions.

Official legal texts and current public-agency documents were prioritized when establishing legal status, territorial scope, institutional competence, and recent enforcement information. Public-interest reports were used only when their scope and methodology were identifiable, and journalistic estimates were not used as metropolitan fleet counts.

4.5 Instrument refinement and documentary verification

The interview guide was reviewed by two specialists with experience in qualitative mobility research, transport governance, and qualitative methods. Their feedback addressed conceptual relevance, semantic clarity, alignment with the research question, and the ability of prompts to elicit narratives about temporal certainty, enforcement, coordination, livelihood, and legitimacy.

A pilot phase was conducted to refine wording and sequence, merge overlapping questions, and strengthen probes on waiting time, route familiarity, enforcement adaptation, safety, and imagined regulatory alternatives. The pilot interviews remained in the corpus because no substantive changes altered the meaning of the core questions.

4.6 Integrated thematic and legal analysis

Interview analysis used ATLAS.ti 24 in iterative open, axial, and focused coding. Sensitizing concepts, including vernacular governmentality, temporal certainty, mobile moorings, and mobility justice, guided attention without limiting the analysis to inductive categories expressed in participants’ own language.

Open coding identified meanings related to access, safety, formalization, economic burden, route organization, authority, livelihood, and inequality. Axial and focused coding then organized relationships among temporal certainty, last-mile barriers, moral legitimacy, enforcement pressure, distributed coordination, and policy expectations. Analytic memos recorded contradictions and negative cases.

Legal materials were analyzed through qualitative statutory and regulatory interpretation: relevant provisions were extracted, territorial scope and institutional competence were established, and formal requirements were compared with the practices and perceptions described in interviews. The analysis distinguished authorization status from documented harm and from participant judgments of legitimacy.

Integration occurred by comparing each empirical theme with the applicable legal rule, official contextual evidence, theoretical concept, and policy implication. This process supported data reduction, categorization, interpretation, and synthesis while avoiding the treatment of interview testimony as proof of legal content or citywide prevalence.

These visualizations supplement, rather than replace, close reading of transcripts, comparisons across actor groups, and the integration of empirical themes with the legal and theoretical framework.

4.7 Analytical rigor and validation

Rigor was supported through verbatim transcription, a hierarchical codebook with operational definitions, analytic memos, comparisons across actor groups, negative-case analysis, and consensus review. The research team repeatedly checked whether interpretations were grounded in identifiable excerpts and whether contrary accounts required modifications of a category.

Two researchers independently coded a subset of the corpus. Cohen’s kappa was κ = 0.64. Given the interpretive and multi-label nature of the code system, this coefficient was treated as supportive evidence of coding consistency rather than a stand-alone quality threshold. Disagreements were discussed to refine definitions and coding boundaries.

Documentary triangulation served a different function: it verified legal scope, institutional competence, and contextual indicators. Interview claims about fines, route numbers, earnings, or enforcement were not considered official facts unless corroborated. This separation strengthens credibility and prevents category errors between experience, regulation, and prevalence.

Guide changes, coding decisions, analytic memos, source checks, and category revisions were documented throughout the research process. The final analysis preserves ambivalence: users could value convenience while criticizing safety, drivers could defend their work while recognizing disorder, and institutional actors could acknowledge unmet demand while opposing unauthorized operation.

4.8 Ethical considerations

The study involved adults and addressed sensitive issues related to informality, enforcement, labor precarity, and possible illegality. Participation was voluntary; participants were informed of the study’s purpose, their right to withdraw, and the measures used to protect their identities. Informed consent was obtained before each interview.

Names, specific operational routes, enforcement locations, personal networks, and institutional details were removed or generalized where disclosure could create administrative, labor, or legal risks. Audio recordings and transcripts were stored securely and accessed only by the research team. The study did not request unnecessary self-incriminating information.

The research protocol was reviewed in 2025 by the Comité Institucional de Ética e Integridad Científica of Universidad Privada Norbert Wiener.

5 Results

The findings are organized around five empirical dimensions that emerged from the thematic analysis and that, taken together, constitute the empirical core of vernacular governmentality in the colectivo system: the lexical centrality of transport order and conflict; temporal certainty and last-mile accessibility; the moral economy of legitimacy; enforcement, fines, and regulatory pressure; and distributed route governance as an informal infrastructure of adaptation. These dimensions were identified through the integration of thematic coding, co-occurrence exploration, the word cloud, and the Sankey diagram developed from the ATLAS.ti corpus.

To increase the transparency of the interpretive process, the following subsections incorporate extended participant quotations. These excerpts are not intended as isolated illustrative fragments but as empirical anchors that allow the reader to evaluate how the interpretation moves from participants’ accounts to the analytical categories developed in the study. Each quotation is identified through a pseudonym code and participant group: P refers to passengers/users, D to colectivo drivers or transport operators, and IA to institutional actors.

5.1 Lexical structure of the corpus: transport, order, and conflict

The word cloud provides a first-level visualization of the semantic field surrounding colectivos in Metropolitan Lima. The most prominent terms— “transportation,” “order,” “people,” “driver,” “passenger,” “route,” “fine,” “vehicle,” “money,” “Metropolitano,” “informality,” “ATU,” “operation,” “service,” “authority,” and “control”—show that participants did not describe colectivos merely as an informal transport option. Instead, their narratives were organized around a persistent tension between mobility usefulness, regulatory control, and economic survival.

The centrality of “transportation,” “route,” “passenger,” and “driver” indicates that the colectivo system was primarily narrated as an everyday mobility arrangement. Participants repeatedly framed colectivos in relation to practical movement: reaching destinations, connecting with formal services, reducing walking distances, avoiding long waits, and choosing between formal and informal options. At the same time, the prominence of “order,” “authority,” “ATU,” “PNP,” “operation,” “fine,” “infraction,” and “control” reveals that the experience of colectivos is inseparable from enforcement and regulatory pressure. Finally, the presence of “money,” “work,” “family,” “resource,” and “worker” shows that the system is also understood as a livelihood structure, especially from the perspective of drivers and their families.

This lexical structure is reflected in participants’ descriptions of the relationship between informality, state neglect, and everyday mobility. Rather than narrating informality solely as individual deviance, some participants framed it as a broader response to institutional absence and long-standing disorder in the transport system. This is evident in the following passenger account:

Participant quotation (P1, passenger/user):

“The State neglects everyone, because not even the Ministry of Transport does anything.

I could not say, because since I was born up to now, it has always been chaos.

Everything should be formal and legal. But in our country, informality has become the solution for most Peruvians.

It depends, but if the authorities themselves do not enforce it, citizens will do so even less.

I do not think they are either good or bad, but if they are formalized, the people who use them as an informal option must be taken into account; otherwise, a large sector of that field will be harmed.”

The reference to the “Ministry of Transport” is significant because, although the participant uses a colloquial name, it refers to Peru’s Ministry of Transport and Communications (Ministerio de Transportes y Comunicaciones, MTC). This mention shifts the explanation of informality from the behavior of individual users or drivers to the institutional conditions that shape everyday mobility. By invoking the State and the MTC, the participant points to a broader perception of state absence and weak regulatory enforcement. In this account, disorder is not presented as an exceptional failure but as a long-standing condition that citizens have learned to navigate. Informality, therefore, appears less as a personal preference than as a socially normalized response to a transport system perceived as insufficiently governed.

This quotation condenses several terms that appear prominently in the lexical analysis: state neglect, chaos, legality, informality, enforcement, and formalization. Importantly, the participant does not defend informality as an ideal condition. Instead, informality is described as a practical settlement arising from the gap between formal expectations and institutional performance. The statement that “informality has become the solution for most Peruvians” shows how colectivos are situated within a wider grammar of necessity: they are not merely illegal vehicles but part of a normalized repertoire through which residents respond to institutional failure. The final sentence also anticipates the policy tension that runs across the corpus: formalization is desirable, but only if it does not harm the users who currently depend on informal transport options.

The word cloud also anticipates the key analytical finding of the study: colectivos are located at the intersection of three competing grammars. For users, they are often described through the grammar of access, proximity, comfort, and time. For drivers, they are narrated through the grammar of work, dignity, survival, and economic necessity. For institutional actors, they appear through the grammar of order, regulation, infractions, documentation, and enforcement. Vernacular governmentality emerges precisely in this intersection, where informal actors produce practical order under conditions in which formal order is experienced as incomplete, punitive, or territorially uneven.

The Sankey diagram complements this lexical reading by illustrating how code families interconnect. Structural problems such as limited access, insufficient formal transport, financial barriers, and mobility inequality relate to practical responses like route changes, adaptive driving, informal coordination, and demands for formalization. Similarly, regulatory pressure leads to defensive strategies, income loss, and perceptions of persecution. These relationships suggest that informality is not merely an isolated legal status but a dynamic field of interaction among mobility needs, enforcement practices, and survival strategies.

The Sankey diagram also reveals that the interpretive field is not centered around a single actor. Passengers, drivers, and institutional actors assign different meanings to the same phenomenon. For passengers, colectivos are perceived in terms of access, proximity, cost, comfort, and time; for drivers, in terms of work, fines, family needs, and self-defense; for institutional actors, in terms of order, documentation, infractions, and vehicle flow. The movement between these code families indicates that colectivos are not a fixed object of analysis but a relational system whose meaning shifts depending on the actor’s position within the mobility field.

5.2 Temporal certainty and last-mile accessibility

The first substantive finding concerns temporal certainty as a key reason why colectivos remain socially valuable despite their contested legal status. Across passenger narratives, colectivos were appreciated not only for their speed but also for reducing uncertainty in everyday mobility. Participants associated them with shorter waiting times, fewer transfers, greater proximity to points of origin or destination, and a higher likelihood of arriving within a manageable time frame.

This finding is supported by the prominence of codes related to access, accessibility, convenience, comfort, preference, route changes, limited access, mobility dependence, and insufficient formal transport. Participants did not describe mobility in Lima as a simple choice between legal and illegal transport. Instead, they portrayed it as a practical calculation influenced by distance, money, time, safety, bodily comfort, and the reliability of formal services. In this sense, the use of colectivos emerges from a contextual evaluation of what is available, affordable, and predictable under unequal urban conditions.

The relationship between time, comfort, income, and place of residence is evident in passengers’ accounts. Colectivos are valued not only as faster vehicles but also as a means of reducing bodily discomfort, overcrowding, and uncertainty in daily commuting. One passenger articulated this preference as follows:

Participant quotation (P7, passenger/user):

“I prefer them because I travel more comfortably and not squeezed in like in the Metropolitano, and because I reach my destination in less time.

Sometimes they help me, while at other times they harm me because of the delays they cause.

Some take alternative routes and notify each other through their WhatsApp group that there is an operation.

It depends on whether you have money and where you live, because not everyone can pay the price of a colectivo or a taxi.

It is a solution that we should include, since many people use it.”

This account illustrates that temporal certainty is not solely linked to speed. The participant links the preference for colectivos to comfort, reduced overcrowding, shorter travel time, and the ability to reach the destination within a more predictable timeframe. The comparison with the Metropolitano is especially relevant because it demonstrates that formal transport is not rejected only because of duration, but also because of the embodied experience of travel: congestion, crowding, physical discomfort, and the loss of control over one’s commuting conditions. In this respect, colectivos are perceived as providing a more manageable journey, even when they operate outside or on the margins of formal regulation.

At the same time, the quotation introduces two important qualifications. First, colectivos can also cause delays and disruptions, especially when drivers change routes to avoid enforcement operations. The reference to WhatsApp groups indicates that informality is not disorganized in a simplistic sense; rather, it involves its own informal coordination mechanisms, through which drivers share information, anticipate inspections, and adjust routes in real time. This adaptive capacity helps explain why colectivos can remain operational and useful, but it also reveals how their flexibility may create uncertainty for other road users and for the transport system as a whole.

Second, access to this temporal advantage is unequal. The participant explicitly states that mobility “depends on whether you have money and where you live,” linking transport choice to socioeconomic status and residential location. Colectivos may reduce waiting time or walking distance for some passengers, but not everyone can afford them, and not all areas have the same access to formal or informal transport alternatives. Temporal certainty, therefore, is socially distributed rather than universally available. It is influenced by income, urban peripherality, route coverage, and the extent to which formal transport reaches the everyday spaces where people live, work, and study.

The last-mile dimension is crucial here. In peripheral or poorly connected areas, the most challenging part of the journey is often not the longest segment, but the first or final connection to the formal network. Colectivos become significant when formal buses are distant, when routes do not reach residential areas, when passengers must walk through poorly lit or unsafe streets, or when the formal system requires transfers that increase time and uncertainty. In these contexts, colectivos serve as informal feeder services, connecting users to larger corridors or directly to destinations that formal services do not adequately cover.

However, temporal certainty is not achieved without costs. The same flexibility that allows colectivos to reduce waiting time and walking distance can also lead to disorderly stops, route improvisation, unsafe boarding points, competition for passengers, and conflicts with enforcement. The result is a spatial and regulatory trade-off: colectivos improve access for some passengers while externalizing risks onto streets, corridors, pedestrians, and other transport users. This is why temporal certainty must be understood as a governed object. It is produced through daily decisions about routes, stops, waiting points, enforcement avoidance, passenger-driver coordination, and the unequal distribution of mobility options across the city.

5.3 The moral economy of legitimacy: usefulness, non-harm, and social recognition

The second finding concerns the moral economy through which colectivos are evaluated. Participants did not assess colectivos solely through formal legality. Instead, they distinguished between illegality, usefulness, abuse, harm, and necessity. This distinction is central to understanding why colectivos can remain socially legitimate even when they are institutionally framed as informal or illegal.

The code families “Informal Justifications,” “Work Alternatives,” “Perceptions Overview,” and “Transport Formalization” show that participants frequently justified colectivo use and colectivo driving based on necessity, family support, honesty, livelihood, lack of alternatives, and non-harm. Drivers framed their work as a survival strategy rather than as a deliberate violation of the law. Their narratives did not deny the contested legal status of the activity, but they shifted the moral focus of the discussion toward the conditions under which the work is performed and the social needs it satisfies.

Drivers’ accounts demonstrate that legitimacy is constructed through a moral vocabulary of work, non-harm, family responsibility, and recognition. The following driver narrative is especially revealing:

Participant quotation (D2, driver/transport operator):

“As long as I do not harm or affect anyone, I do feel dignified in my work.

There are people who already know us when we provide colectivo services.

They should give us facilities so we can work peacefully and avoid the fines that harm us.

The truth is that painting the vehicle costs money; it is not free. Paying the fines for the vehicles costs money.

I would tell them to formalize us because we are private cars. Through this work, we feed our children and pay for their studies at universities and schools.

If they cut off this means of work, they take away our daily livelihood.”

The phrase “as long as I do not harm or affect anyone” is central to the moral economy of colectivo work. The driver does not claim legitimacy primarily through legal status, but through the perceived absence of harm, the familiarity of passengers, and the household economy sustained by the activity. In this account, dignity is not derived from formal recognition alone; it is also produced through daily labor, social usefulness, and the capacity to support dependents. The reference to passengers who “already know us” suggests that legitimacy is also relational. It emerges from repeated interactions, route familiarity, and forms of local trust that are not captured by formal regulatory categories.

At the same time, the quotation reveals the economic costs of remaining outside formal recognition. The driver mentions fines, vehicle adaptation, and the material burden of complying with or responding to enforcement requirements. These elements show that informality is not necessarily experienced as a space of unrestricted freedom. Rather, it can involve permanent exposure to sanctions, uncertainty, and financial vulnerability. The driver’s demand for formalization is therefore not a rejection of regulation itself, but a request for a regulatory pathway that acknowledges the service as work and allows it to be performed without constant punishment.

This does not eliminate the safety concerns associated with informal transport, but it explains why drivers resist being represented only as illegal or irresponsible actors. Their account reframes colectivo driving as a livelihood practice rooted in social recognition and economic necessity. The moral claim is not simply, “we should be allowed to operate,” but rather, “we should be recognized because we provide a needed service, do not intend to harm, and sustain our families through this work.”

The phrase “as long as it does no harm” captures the practical moral boundary that appears throughout the corpus. Colectivo work is perceived as legitimate when it provides a useful service, respects passengers, avoids evident danger, and allows drivers to survive. It becomes illegitimate when associated with reckless driving, abusive fares, unsafe practices, lack of documentation, disorder, or harm to passengers and pedestrians. This moral distinction does not perfectly align with the legal distinction between formal and informal transport. Instead, it reflects a street-level evaluation of fairness, usefulness, and harm.

This moral boundary also appears in passenger narratives. Several passengers did not describe drivers as intrinsically dangerous; rather, they differentiated between drivers who are “just trying to work,” those who behave irregularly, and institutional responses that they perceive as excessive or poorly designed. The legitimacy of colectivos is therefore negotiated at street level through repeated interaction, perceived usefulness, route familiarity, and the belief that the service addresses real transport needs. This is why formal illegality does not automatically translate into social illegitimacy.

Users also expressed ambivalence. Some passengers valued colectivos because they improved access, comfort, and time reliability. Others preferred formal services because they perceived them as safer or more orderly. This ambivalence is analytically important because it shows that the social legitimacy of colectivos is conditional, not absolute. Participants do not romanticize informality. They recognize its usefulness while also identifying its risks. The colectivo system is therefore sustained by a fragile legitimacy: it is tolerated and defended when it addresses a real mobility problem, but criticized when it generates visible disorder, danger, or abuse.

Institutional actors also contributed to this moral field, although from a different position. Their narratives emphasized documentation, infractions, improper stopping, the use of restricted lanes, enforcement operations, and the need to reduce informality. However, even these institutional perspectives implicitly recognized that colectivos persist because they respond to a real demand. This creates a central tension: the state frames colectivos as a problem of regulation and safety, while many users and drivers see them as a necessary response to inadequate transport coverage and limited work opportunities.

Overall, the moral economy of legitimacy shows that the persistence of colectivos cannot be explained only by weak enforcement or individual non-compliance. It is also sustained by shared evaluations of necessity, usefulness, and acceptable conduct. Colectivos remain socially legible because they occupy an ambiguous position: they are legally contested, institutionally problematized, and sometimes risky, but they are also experienced as practical, familiar, and economically necessary. Their legitimacy is therefore neither fully granted nor fully denied; it is continuously produced, questioned, and renegotiated in everyday mobility practices.

5.4 Enforcement, fines, and regulatory pressure

The third finding concerns the experience of regulation as pressure, punishment, and selective control. Codes such as “Regulation: Enforcement,” “Regulation: Fines,” “Regulation: Abusive Fines,” “Driver Regulation: Compliance,” “Driver Regulation: Control,” “Regulation: Avoiding Sanctions,” “Financial Challenges: Daily Earnings,” “Financial Challenges: Financial Burden,” and “Financial Challenges: Income Loss” show that enforcement is one of the strongest organizing forces in the colectivo system.

Participants described enforcement operations involving the Urban Transport Authority for Lima and Callao (ATU) and the Peruvian National Police (PNP), document checks, fines, and actions to prevent colectivos from entering restricted or segregated lanes. From the institutional side, enforcement was framed as a mechanism to ensure compliance, reduce informality, improve vehicle flow, and sanction infractions. However, from the perspective of drivers and some users, enforcement was often perceived as disproportionate, punitive, or disconnected from the structural reasons why colectivos exist.

The financial dimension is important, but the quoted amounts must be interpreted correctly. Drivers contrasted sanctions of several thousand soles with daily earnings of approximately 70 soles. These figures are based on participant reports and may reflect multiple infractions, accumulated debt, impoundment costs, or earlier UIT values; they are not presented as the current official penalty schedule. Their analytical significance lies in the fact that exposure to sanctions is experienced as a livelihood threat capable of immobilizing the vehicle and destabilizing household income.

The economic burden of enforcement was described in particularly concrete terms by drivers. For them, fines are not experienced as abstract regulatory tools, but as sanctions that can exceed their capacity to pay and threaten the continuity of work itself:

Participant quotation (D2, driver/transport operator):

“It is a way of defending ourselves from fines that are very serious and very high.

For example, right now fines can reach 19,000 to 20,000 soles. That is why sometimes we protest so that the fines are reduced.

If they give us a fine of 3,000 to 4,000 soles, and let us say we earn 70 soles a day, do you think we can pay it?

They only give us five working days, and no one has that amount to pay immediately.

If they take this job away from us, they take away our work tool, the one we use to survive day by day.”

This quotation shows why enforcement produces defensive adaptation rather than simple compliance. When sanctions are perceived as disproportionate to daily earnings, the regulatory encounter is interpreted as a threat to subsistence. The vehicle is not only a means of transport; it is also a work tool. Removing it from circulation or imposing an unpayable fine affects not only the driver’s legal status but also the household economy that depends on daily earnings. This helps explain why drivers view route changes, sign removals, temporary withdrawals, and avoidance of control points as forms of self-defense.

This explains why evasion appears repeatedly in the corpus. Participants described route changes, communication among drivers, temporary withdrawals, sign removals, and avoidance of control points. These practices should not be interpreted solely as non-compliance; they are also defensive responses to a regulatory environment perceived as economically unsustainable. When regulation is experienced as disproportionate or as control without support, drivers develop adaptive strategies that allow them to continue working while reducing exposure to sanctions.

Institutional actors narrated enforcement differently. From their perspective, enforcement is framed as a necessary mechanism for establishing order, verifying documentation, and reducing unsafe or irregular circulation. This contrast is evident in the following account from a traffic police officer:

Participant quotation (IA2, institutional actor / traffic police officer):

“When there is an operation, we ask for documents to see whether they are in order, verify whether they have a license, and check whether it is safe.

To reduce informality, because in that way we can reduce the number of vehicles that do not have their documentation in order.

I do not think the State cares, but for us it does, because that way we can have greater control and better order, helping to ensure good vehicle flow.

Many of them do not want to identify themselves, others do not accept the infraction they committed, others flee, and we ask for support.

There is an equitable approach, since it depends on their economic situation. Many of them have families, and that is why they work in that way.”

This account demonstrates that institutional actors are aware of the socioeconomic vulnerability of drivers, but they interpret enforcement through the lens of order, control, identification, documentation, and road safety. The contrast between the drivers’ and the officers’ accounts reveals the core conflict between two rationalities. For drivers, enforcement can threaten their survival; for institutional actors, enforcement is a technique for making circulation legible and governable. Vernacular governmentality emerges in the friction between these two logics: the informal strategies through which drivers continue operating are shaped by the very regulatory pressures that seek to contain them.

Users also notice these enforcement effects. Some reported that drivers change routes, have passengers get out before reaching control points, or avoid certain areas during operations. These practices can create inconvenience, delays, and uncertainty for passengers, even when the original purpose of using colectivos was to reduce uncertainty. In this sense, enforcement does not simply suppress informality; it reshapes it. It produces new routes, new waiting points, new risks, and new forms of coordination.

5.5 Distributed route governance and adaptive coordination

The fourth finding concerns the distributed governance infrastructure that sustains the colectivo system. Colectivos do not operate as a fully centralized organization, nor do they function as isolated individual vehicles. The code families “Driver Regulation,” “Public Transit Routes,” “Work Alternatives,” and “Regulation” show that drivers coordinate through route knowledge, communication, adaptive decision-making, and shared responses to enforcement.

Participants described drivers changing routes during operations, communicating by phone, removing signs, choosing alternative paths, or temporarily stopping work. One driver explained that when there is an operation, drivers communicate by phone, remove signs, and change routes. Another participant described this as a way of defending themselves from serious fines. These accounts illustrate a system capable of rapid adaptation. Enforcement produces movement, not disappearance. The network reconfigures itself through small tactical decisions distributed across drivers, routes, and time slots.

Adaptive coordination is most evident in accounts of route changes, phone communication, sign removal, and the use of alternative corridors during enforcement operations. One driver described this as a routine practical response to anticipated control:

Participant quotation (D1, driver/transport operator):

“I change routes; if I have passengers, I choose another route.

It is a way of defending ourselves and resisting, since we avoid being stopped.

If they stop me, they will not believe that I am a taxi driver, because if the ATU sees us with three or four passengers, they will always say it is a colectivo.

Operations should involve investigating the driver, but even so, they ask passengers whether they are relatives or friends, so they look for ways to sanction us.

That is why we look for different alternatives to work.”

This excerpt shows that route governance is not improvised chaos. It is a practical repertoire through which drivers interpret enforcement risk and reorganize movement. The driver’s references to defending themselves, resisting, avoiding stops, and finding alternatives illustrate how mobility decisions are embedded in a defensive regulatory environment. The route becomes more than a path between origin and destination; it is also a tactical instrument for preserving livelihoods under uncertainty.

This adaptive capacity is central to vernacular governmentality. The colectivo system governs mobility through practical intelligence rather than formal planning. Drivers know which corridors have demand, which routes are more exposed to control, where passengers wait, when formal transport is insufficient, and how enforcement patterns change. Passengers also participate in this governance by learning where to wait, which routes are reliable, and when colectivos are more likely to be available. The system is therefore sustained by shared urban knowledge.

Passenger narratives confirm that users also observe and participate indirectly in this adaptive system. Some passengers reported that drivers change routes, communicate with each other, or make passengers get out before reaching enforcement points. These practices can protect drivers from fines, but they may also transfer uncertainty to passengers. Thus, informal coordination simultaneously produces continuity and instability: it keeps the service operating, but it can alter routes, extend travel times, and create unexpected interruptions. This ambivalence is central to understanding colectivos as vernacular infrastructure rather than as a purely efficient mobility solution.

The word cloud reinforces this point. The prominence of “route,” “way,” “operation,” “sign,” “document,” “driver,” “passenger,” “ATU,” “PNP,” and “control” indicates that movement is constantly negotiated between practical demand and regulatory pressure. Routes are not simply geographic paths; they are tactical arrangements shaped by demand, enforcement, safety, and familiarity. A route can serve as a service corridor, an evasion strategy, a livelihood path, and a site of conflict with authority.

Distributed governance also has limits. Route changes can protect drivers from sanctions and preserve service continuity, but they may also create inconvenience for passengers, increase uncertainty, or shift risk to secondary streets. Informal coordination produces flexibility, but not necessarily accountability. It can maintain mobility under pressure, but it does not guarantee uniform safety standards, transparent fares, or equitable access. This is why the findings do not present colectivos as an ideal alternative to formal transport. Rather, they show that colectivos constitute a functioning but fragile governance system, one that solves some problems while reproducing others.

These findings also highlight the two additional conceptual resources introduced in the theoretical framework. What the data describe as “knowing which routes are clear this week,” “being embedded in the right WhatsApp group,” or “recognizing which corner a familiar driver uses” is what this article calls vernacular motility capital: access to informal governance intelligence that translates into real mobility capacity. Its unequal distribution is evident in the corpus. Long-time residents, regular colectivo users, and those embedded in driver networks navigate enforcement disruptions with relative ease: they know where the service relocates, when it resumes, and which secondary corridor to use. By contrast, newcomers to a district, infrequent users, and passengers without mobile devices or social ties to the network are more vulnerable to the disruptions that enforcement generates.

The data also illustrate what the framework calls mobile moorings. Participants described not fixed bus stops or designated corridors, but provisional social anchors: a regular corner where a known driver passes at a predictable time, a WhatsApp message signaling route availability, or a shared habit of where to wait on a Tuesday morning before an inspection shift. These are not infrastructural supports in the conventional sense; they are social ones, temporary and collectively maintained. When enforcement displaces them, the moorings do not disappear. They are reconstituted elsewhere, which is precisely what the adaptive coordination documented in this section describes.

5.6 Formalization, integration, and risk-sensitive improvement

The fifth finding concerns participants’ expectations regarding formalization and integration. The code families “Improvement Proposals” and “Transport Formalization” show that participants did not simply reject regulation. Many called for formalization, documentation, designated stops, greater equality, integration into the transport system, improved coverage, more formal vehicles, and better frequency. The conflict was not over regulation itself, but over the type of regulation and its implementation.

Some participants argued that colectivos should be formalized and integrated into the transport system. Others suggested that drivers should have documentation, authorized routes, designated stops, or visible identification. These proposals indicate that formalization is not necessarily perceived as repression. For many participants, it could also mean recognition, order, safety, and the possibility of working without persecution. In this sense, drivers’ demands for recognition and users’ demands for better service converge around the need for a regulatory framework that does not erase the practical function colectivos currently perform.

Participants’ proposals for improvement show that the demand is not simply for deregulation or tolerance. Several accounts call for formalization, clearer rules, improved public transport coverage, and control mechanisms that do not harm users who depend on these services. One passenger who usually prefers formal transport nevertheless recognized the need to integrate colectivos under clearer conditions:

Participant quotation (P6, passenger/user):

“No, I do not usually use colectivos. I prefer minibuses or formal transportation such as the ATU system because it seems safer and regulated to me.

I think the State tries to control them because colectivos are not formalized, but it does not offer them a clear alternative.

Some people prefer them because of speed or because they leave them closer, but I prefer safety and order.

Sometimes they help, but I also feel that there are not enough routes and that the formal system needs better frequencies.

They may not be the best option, but they could be part of the solution if they are properly formalized and adhere to regulations.

We need to improve the coverage and frequency of formal transportation and maintain better control without affecting those who simply want to move around with dignity.”

This quotation is analytically useful because it does not romanticize colectivos. The participant recognizes safety, order, and regulation as legitimate concerns while also pointing out that the State does not provide a sufficiently clear or adequate alternative. The proposal, therefore, is not to leave colectivos untouched but to combine formalization with better coverage, improved frequency, and a form of control that does not penalize mobility needs. The phrase “move around with dignity” is especially relevant because it connects transport policy with everyday citizenship: mobility is not only a technical issue of routes and vehicles but also a condition for accessing work, study, care, and urban life without excessive vulnerability. This supports the article’s argument for risk-sensitive integration rather than prohibition.

However, participants also warned that formalization must not overlook access needs. Several improvement proposals emphasized the need for better coverage and frequency of formal transportation. Others suggested implementing more vehicles like the Metropolitano or extending formal services farther. These statements indicate that the colectivo problem cannot be solved solely by sanctioning drivers. If the underlying access deficit persists, the suppression of colectivos would likely displace rather than eliminate informal mobility.

An institutional actor also recognized the usefulness of colectivos while framing formalization as necessary to avoid conflict with regulated corridors:

Participant quotation (IA1, institutional actor/ATU worker):

“It is mostly a problem, because they should have their own stop so that problems with the ATU can be avoided.

Yes, I recognize it because many people use them since they arrive a little faster and go directly.

They must become formal because they also have the right to work.

In my case, I do not carry out inspections; I organize access for the corridor. Inspectors work together with the police, because by themselves they cannot issue fines.

There would have to be a conversation with the State in order to reach an agreement.”

This institutional account reinforces the ambivalence identified throughout the corpus. Colectivos are seen as a problem when they interfere with regulated corridors, but their usefulness and the drivers’ right to work are also acknowledged. The suggestion that they should have “their own stop” points toward a concrete integration mechanism: designated spaces, visible organization, and negotiated rules. Rather than treating colectivos only as vehicles to be removed from circulation, this account opens the possibility of regulating their points of interaction with the formal system. In practical terms, this could involve authorized stopping points, route delimitation, documentation requirements, and coordination with existing corridors. The account therefore supports a regulatory approach that distinguishes between the feeder function of colectivos and the risks associated with their current informal operation.

The findings indicate a need for risk-sensitive integration. Such integration would differentiate between the practical mobility function of colectivos and the risks associated with their current informal operation. It would recognize where colectivos address real last-mile deficits while setting minimum standards for documentation, safety, stops, identification, and route authorization. It would also calibrate enforcement according to documented harm rather than relying only on administrative status. Participants’ proposals suggest that a viable regulatory pathway would need to combine recognition, proportionality, safety, accountability, and improved formal coverage.

Risk-sensitive integration does not imply validating all current practices of colectivo operation. Rather, it acknowledges that prohibition alone may intensify the very access problems that sustain informal mobility. A more viable approach would identify where colectivos are substituting for absent or insufficient services, where they generate unacceptable risks, and where they could be reorganized into a safer and more accountable complementary system. In this sense, formalization would not be merely a legal conversion but a process of negotiated integration between mobility needs, labor realities, and public safety standards.

5.7 Synthesis of findings

Taken together, the findings show that colectivos are not merely a symptom of disorder in Lima’s transport system. They represent a vernacular governance arrangement through which users and drivers produce access, time reliability, and practical mobility under conditions of institutional fragmentation. Their legitimacy is grounded not only in legality but also in usefulness, non-harm, familiarity, livelihood, and the absence of sufficient formal alternatives.

At the same time, the system remains contested. Colectivos generate real concerns about safety, disorder, informality, documentation, and traffic management. Institutional actors view them through the lens of enforcement and regulation, while users and drivers evaluate them based on access, work, and survival. This creates a field of friction in which two governmental rationalities coexist: the formal rationality of order, documentation, and compliance, and the vernacular rationality of temporal certainty, adaptation, and livelihood.

A passenger account captures the overall tension between usefulness, informality, access inequality, and the need for clear rules:

Participant quotation (P5, passenger/user):

“I feel they are persecuted more than helped, although there is a real problem of informality.

Because they are faster and sometimes easier to find.

In general, they make it more complicated. Many times, they do not adjust to the reality of informal transportation.

They change routes or communicate with each other to avoid them.

The passengers, especially those who live in areas with little access to formal transportation, are affected.

It depends completely on how much money you have and where you live. Not everyone has access to the same transportation services.

I think they are a solution that should be formalized and included with clear rules.”

This quotation synthesizes the empirical argument of the results. Colectivos are perceived as useful because they are easier to find, more direct, and responsive to areas with limited formal access. At the same time, they are associated with informality, route changes, and regulatory evasion. The participant’s support for formalization with clear rules reflects a policy position that is neither simple tolerance nor pure repression, but rather integration under conditions that address safety, access, and accountability. The account also shows that access to safer or more reliable alternatives depends on income and residential location.

The empirical contribution of this section is therefore threefold. First, it shows that temporal certainty is a central governed object in Lima’s informal mobility system. Second, it demonstrates that legitimacy is produced through a street-level moral economy organized around usefulness, non-harm, recognition, and livelihood. Third, it reveals that colectivos operate through distributed route governance, using adaptive coordination to respond to enforcement and maintain service continuity. These findings provide the empirical basis for the discussion that follows, where vernacular governmentality is developed as a conceptual framework for understanding informal mobility governance in unequal metropolitan contexts.

6 Discussion

The findings support a central interpretive claim: Lima’s colectivos constitute a form of vernacular governmentality. This does not imply that informality is inherently legitimate or safe. It means that passengers and drivers create practical arrangements involving routes, waiting points, reputational cues, communication channels, judgments about acceptable risk, and responses to enforcement where formal provision does not reliably govern the entire journey. The concept captures both functional capacity and regulatory deficiency.

Three tensions organize the discussion: temporal certainty versus nominal formal coverage; social legitimacy versus legal authorization; and adaptive coordination versus public accountability. Treating these as tensions, rather than choosing one side, moves the analysis beyond description and permits a direct comparison between empirical practice, transport law, and recent international research on informal network formation and integration (Sunio et al., 2021; Kerzhner, 2023, 2024; Mittal et al., 2024; Gadepalli et al., 2024).

6.1 Temporal certainty as a governed object

The central theoretical contribution is temporal certainty as a governed resource. Speed is a characteristic of the vehicle or segment; temporal certainty concerns whether the entire journey can be completed within a predictable and socially usable timeframe. A formal route may exist and still be functionally inaccessible when the stop is distant, the headway is irregular, transfers are uncertain, or the boarding environment is unsafe. Colectivos create reliability through proximity, repeated route knowledge, and rapid departure rather than through published schedules.

This finding refines mobility justice and motility theory. Infrastructure and route coverage remain necessary, but they do not capture the value of dependable arrival for workers, students, caregivers, and residents of peripheral areas. At the same time, informal temporal certainty is unevenly distributed: those with route knowledge, digital contacts, or familiarity with moving stops are better positioned to utilize it. The concept therefore identifies both a mobility benefit and a new axis of inequality.

6.2 Vernacular governmentality and the conduct of circulation

Vernacular governmentality extends Foucault’s ‘conduct of conduct’ to a setting in which non-state actors manage circulation under intermittent institutional presence. The system is productive, not merely resistant: it allocates departure points, adjusts routes, circulates warnings, establishes reputations, and distinguishes acceptable from abusive behavior. This corresponds with research showing that informal networks emerge through labor organization and distributed route decisions rather than through pure spontaneity (Kerzhner, 2023; Mittal et al., 2024).

The concept is narrower than informality and does not romanticize it. Informality describes a relationship to law; vernacular governmentality identifies the mechanisms through which practical order is created. These mechanisms may reproduce unsafe driving, labor precarity, exclusion from informal information, and weak redress. Recognition of governance capacity is therefore an analytical prerequisite for regulation, not an argument for non-intervention.

6.3 Mobility justice, vernacular motility capital, and mobile moorings

The findings extend mobility justice by identifying vernacular motility capital: access to the social, digital, and territorial knowledge that makes an unstable system usable. A familiar corner, a known driver, an enforcement warning, or knowledge of an alternative street can function as a mobile mooring when formal stops and schedules do not provide reliable anchoring.

These resources reduce uncertainty for insiders but can disadvantage newcomers, older users without digital access, occasional passengers, and those traveling at night. Risk-sensitive integration should therefore convert useful local knowledge into public information and stable access without reproducing closed networks or requiring passengers to rely on personal ties.

6.4 The moral economy of legitimacy

Participants evaluated colectivos through three partially competing frameworks. Users emphasized access and arrival; drivers emphasized livelihood and dignity; institutions emphasized authorization, road safety, and enforceability. Social legitimacy emerged conditionally through usefulness and non-harm, not through a denial of risk. This explains why the service can be defended by users while remaining legally unauthorized.

The legal framework does not recognize necessity as a substitute for authorization. Yet enforcement legitimacy is also weakened when public institutions sanction a service without providing a feasible alternative in the same territory and time window. The resulting conflict is not resolved by declaring one side correct; it requires a regulatory design that protects passengers and pedestrians while addressing the mobility deficit that sustains demand.

6.5 Enforcement, adaptation, and the reconfiguration of informality

Enforcement operations reconfigure rather than simply remove the service. Drivers shift stops, change or remove signs, use warnings, alter departure times, and move to secondary streets. This distributed adaptation explains persistence but can transfer risk to less visible locations and increase uncertainty for passengers. The finding is consistent with network research showing that informal systems can reconstitute after disruption because coordination is decentralized (Mittal et al., 2024).

A legal distinction is crucial. The participant-reported burden of fines is evidence of how enforcement is experienced, not proof of the current sanction tariff. The official issue is broader: unauthorized service, missing licenses, insurance or inspection, and unsafe operation are legitimate enforcement concerns, while indiscriminate suppression may exacerbate access deficits. Proportionality therefore requires matching interventions to documented risks and providing a transition route for operators capable of meeting public standards.

6.6 Policy implications: from suppression to risk-sensitive integration

The policy implication is neither blanket legalization nor passive tolerance. It is a staged, risk-sensitive integration framework led by ATU and limited to corridors where unmet feeder demand is demonstrated. Pilot selection should use official service maps, travel-time and waiting evidence, pedestrian-risk assessments, passenger demand, and the persistence of informal routes as diagnostic evidence, without treating those routes as sufficient proof of authorization.

Entry conditions should include verified driver licensing, vehicle technical inspections, SOAT coverage, visible identification, route or service-area authorization, designated safe boarding points, fare disclosure, passenger limits, incident reporting, and a complaints channel. Authorization should be time-limited and renewable only if operators meet published safety and service indicators. The framework should also establish data-minimization safeguards so that traceability does not lead to unnecessary surveillance of passengers.

Institutional responsibilities must be explicit. ATU should authorize, map, monitor, and evaluate pilots; road-safety and police authorities should focus enforcement on dangerous conduct and unlicensed operations; municipalities should support safe curb and pedestrian design; and driver associations may assist in training and communication but should not control entry or complaints. Passenger and disability organizations should participate in defining accessibility and safety criteria.

Enforcement should be graduated. Immediate removal remains appropriate for unlicensed driving, lack of insurance, failed technical inspections, dangerous maneuvers, violence, or repeated breaches of route conditions. Correctable administrative failures can be addressed through notice, short compliance periods, and escalating sanctions. This distinction operationalizes proportionality without weakening the state’s duty to protect life and legal certainty.

Evaluation should compare pilot and non-pilot corridors using waiting and travel-time reliability, crashes and near misses, complaints, insurance and inspection compliance, fare variation, boarding safety, effects on authorized services, and distributional outcomes by gender, disability, age, and time of day. A pilot that improves reliability but increases pedestrian risk or exclusion should not be scaled. Gadepalli et al. (2024) similarly emphasize tactical coordination between formal and paratransit systems rather than integration by declaration alone.

6.7 Informality, urban governance, and the global south

The Lima case contributes to Global South scholarship by demonstrating that informal governance can be organized through service usefulness and reciprocal dependence rather than primarily through coercion. This distinction aligns with Roy’s account of informality as a mode of urban practice and Simone’s ‘people as infrastructure,’ while posing a specific governmental question: how circulation is stabilized, adapted, and legitimated under pressure.

Comparative work cautions that formalization can destabilize livelihoods or reproduce exclusion when it overlooks internal organization and labor relations (Sunio et al., 2021; Kerzhner, 2023). Conversely, evidence from route and tactical-planning studies shows that informal knowledge can enhance network design when integrated under public safety and accountability rules (Kerzhner, 2024; Gadepalli et al., 2024). Vernacular governmentality, therefore, identifies what must be understood before integration, rather than what should be preserved unchanged.

6.8 Contributions, limitations, and future research

The study extends governmentality scholarship by examining distributed mobility governance under fragmented state presence and by treating temporal certainty as distinct from speed and nominal access. It also develops the concepts of vernacular motility capital and mobile moorings to explain how route knowledge and informal coordination shape practical access. From a socio-legal perspective, the analysis separates authorization, social usefulness, and documented harm, demonstrating why the Lima case cannot be interpreted through the temporary national colectivo regime.

Limitations are methodological, conceptual, and contextual. Twenty-five interviews support mechanism identification and theoretical development but do not provide prevalence estimates. The study lacks GPS traces, standardized travel-time comparisons, crash linkages, fare panels, and complete demographic distributions. The photographs provide context rather than systematic observations. Conceptually, vernacular governmentality may overemphasize coherence in a heterogeneous sector; contextually, findings may not transfer to cities with different legal competencies, labor organizations, geographies, or enforcement capacities.

Future research should combine qualitative interviews with route mapping, stop-level risk audits, travel-time reliability assessments, crash and complaint data, fare variation, and analyses of gender, disability, and night mobility. Comparative legal studies should examine how authorization, insurance, labor protection, and enforcement proportionality differ across Latin American cities. Pilot evaluations should use before-and-after and matched-corridor designs to test whether integration genuinely improves access without increasing harm.

7 Conclusion

This study shows that Lima’s colectivos are neither a residual transport anomaly nor a community solution that can be romanticized. They are an unauthorized but socially embedded mobility arrangement through which users and drivers generate temporal certainty, proximity, livelihood, and adaptive continuity where formal services do not reliably govern the entire journey. Vernacular governmentality names this distributed production of order while maintaining attention to the risks it externalizes.

The theoretical novelty lies in treating reliable arrival as a governed resource distinct from speed and nominal route coverage, and in identifying vernacular motility capital and mobile moorings as unequal forms of access to informal mobility intelligence. The socio-legal contribution is equally important: Lima and Callao are excluded from the national temporary M1-vehicle colectivo regime, so social usefulness cannot be conflated with legal authorization. At the same time, enforcement that overlooks structural access deficits can relocate risk rather than resolve it.

The practical implication is a conditional, risk-sensitive integration pathway under ATU authority: corridor-specific pilots; verified licenses, insurance, and technical inspections; visible identification and route limits; safe boarding points; fare and complaint transparency; proportionate enforcement; and public evaluation using reliability, safety, and equity indicators. This approach does not confer an automatic right to operate. It creates a testable route by which useful feeder functions may be retained only when operators assume enforceable public responsibilities.

The findings are not statistically generalizable and should be tested with spatial, safety, travel-time, fare, and demographic data across different metropolitan contexts. Nevertheless, the case demonstrates why transport law and urban governance must address both access and protection. Informal systems persist not only because rules are weak, but also because formal systems leave time, territory, and connections incompletely governed. A credible reform must therefore reduce the need for informality while making any transitional service safer, accountable, and equitable.

Correction note

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the scientific content of the article.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Mengqiu Cao, University College London, United Kingdom

Reviewed by: Marie Danielle Guillen, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines

Siti Mariyam, Universitas 17 Agustus 1945 Semarang, Indonesia