Sustainable mobility as a source of competitive advantage for Saltillo

Briefing

Located in the Coahuila Desert, the Mexican city of Saltillo stands out for its thriving economy and a high urban competitiveness index. In recent years, the city has undergone a fast-paced growth, driven by its strategic location within one of Mexico’s most industrialised regions. This expansion is set to be further enhanced by the upcoming passenger train project, part of the National Rail Programme, which will connect Saltillo with Nuevo Laredo on the northern border.

This flourishing growth of the city calls for a corresponding development of the current public transport infrastructure to meet the rising demand generated by people’s everyday activities. Nevertheless, Saltillo’s public transport system struggles to keep pace with the mobility needs of its population. This mismatch, aligned with the rapid demographic expansion and industrial concentration, has led to a significant reliance on private transport.

Addressing this challenge requires innovative planning tools and strategies grounded in objective and empirical evidence. The use of alternative data sources for mobility studies, such as Mobile Network Data (MND), has become indispensable for informing infrastructure investment decisions and operational reorganisation in fast-changing urban areas. These alternative sources are opening new opportunities to collect rich spatio-temporal data about human mobility, making it possible to complement and/or replace traditional travel surveys.

This case study examines the potential of MND to contribute to more sustainable and equitable cities, specifically through the generation of high-resolution origin-destination (OD) matrices in Saltillo. The robust and extensive nature of MND, which offers a significantly larger and more representative sample than conventional surveys, provides the basis for a precise understanding of travel demand and mobility patterns. The MND-based OD matrices generated by the project will serve as the core analytical foundation for the reorganisation of city’s public transport routes, enabling the municipal authorities to increase ridership while ensuring that the system is both operationally efficient and financially sustainable. This study highlights the urgency for reliable and updated data that facilitates the deepening of diagnostic insights and the comprehension of urban mobility patterns. The data collected from mobile phone networks represent an effective and cost-efficient alternative for generating these essential diagnostics.

The role of origin-destination matrices

Con el fin de informar la reestructuración del sistema de transporte público, el Instituto Municipal del Transporte de Saltillo encomendó a Red Planners la To inform the reorganisation of its public transport service, the Municipal Institute of Transport of Saltillo commissioned a mobility study. Conducted by Red Planners with Nommon’s assistance, the main input for the analysis was an origin-destination (OD) matrix generated by Nommon’s Mobility Insights solution. This tool measures mobility patterns by leveraging anonymised MND, revealing how people move around and where they are travelling from and to. This data empowers public authorities to:

• Accurately identify mobility needs to inform the location and design of new transport infrastructure and the planning of new transport services.
• Enhance public transport and promote sustainable alternatives such as cycling and walking.
• Reduce reliance on private transport.

Furthermore, the MND-based OD matrix is a key input for the city’s ongoing public transport route restructuring project. By providing a detailed vision of travel patterns, it will help identify critical issues and form the basis for transport simulation models. This, in turn, will support the design and prioritisation of strategic actions that improve mobility across the city.

Solution

Region of study

Saltillo is the capital of the Mexican state of Coahuila, located in the northeast of the country, near the border with the United States. The local economy is heavily reliant on industrial activities, particularly the manufacturing of automobiles, machinery, and steel products. The rapid industrialisation of Saltillo is reflected in a substantial annual growth rate of 2.6%, positioning the city as one of Mexico’s fastest-growing urban areas.

This urban expansion has extended to the neighbouring municipalities of Arteaga and Ramos Arizpe, which collectively form the Saltillo Metropolitan Area (SMA). According to the National Institute of Geography and Statistics Information (INEGI), in 2020[1] [2]  the SMA had a population of 1,093,779 inhabitants.

As in many other Mexican cities, Saltillo’s urban and transport infrastructure has expanded rapidly to accommodate this intense development. Unfortunately, this process has led to a vicious circle in which the expansion of infrastructure stimulates urban sprawl, increasing car dependency, which requires additional infrastructure development.

To gain a deeper understanding of Saltillo’s mobility patterns, we utilised Nommon’s Mobility Insights solution. This tool integrates anonymised MND — obtained through a commercial agreement between Nommon and Telcel — with land use, sociodemographic statistics, transport network and transport supply information to generate high-quality, high-resolution OD matrices and other vital mobility indicators.

Advantages of using Mobile Network Data

Using Mobile Network Data (MND) provides significant benefits over traditional methods like household travel surveys:

• Superior sample size: MND offers a significantly larger sample than traditional surveys, leading to a more precise understanding of mobility patterns.
• Increased efficiency: the study’s execution time is drastically reduced, enabling public authorities to gain faster insights for decision making; from the consultant’s point of view, the reduced time allows the technical teams to focus on the development of transport models and mobility planning policies, where their expertise is more valuable.
• Costs reduction: MND-basedOD matrices are considerably cheaper than household surveys, allowing mobility indicators to be updated more frequently. This scalability also facilitates the analysis of different types of days (e.g., Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays, when mobility patterns differ significantly from working days) and enables studies over larger areas (e.g., the metropolitan region and its connectivity with the study area, rather than just the city under study).
• Comprehensive traceability: the data ensures full traceability of all journeys, eliminating the common issue of underrepresented trips found in household surveys and providing a complete view of population movement.

Outcomes

For the analysis, we examined data from three typical working days from February 2025 to create an average daily mobility profile, broken down into 24 time slots. The project’s zoning system considered the entire Saltillo Metropolitan Area.  Additionally, leveraging the benefits of MND for OD matrix generation, the zoning incorporated a special zone to identify trips originating and/or destined within the Monterrey Metropolitan Area. The sample comprised local population (Telcel’s customers), as well as foreign visitors (roaming-in users), covering 55% of the total population.

This approach allowed us to identify the trips generated and attracted by each zone, regardless of the mode of transport, quantify the total number of journeys, and pinpoint their spatial and temporal patterns. The results showed a total of 3.46 million trips on a regular working day, highlighting the extensive daily mobility within Saltillo. The Municipality of Saltillo accounts for the majority of these, with over 2.59 million trips, followed by Ramos Arizpe (534,000), Arteaga (85,000), and Derramadero (75,000). Additionally, we recorded approximately 177,000 external trips, with over 25,000 of them destined for Monterrey. This finding underscores the strong connection between these two major cities in the region.

While a high volume of trips occurs within the same zones, especially in industrial areas, the research highlighted the need for improved connections between different municipalities and service areas along the main transport corridors. The high concentration of internal trips reveals a strong presence of short-range movements, many of which could be addressed using non-motorised modes, such as walking or cycling. This is most evident in residential areas characterised by dispersed, local commercial provision, but also holds true for large industrial estates, where a substantial portion of daily movements relate to internal logistics activities or transportation between nearby facilities. This pattern suggests that a considerable segment of mobility needs does not require long-range motorised solutions, but rather improvements in local accessibility, street-level connectivity, and last-mile infrastructure.

The analysis confirmed the historical significance of the city centre as a pivotal activity hub, serving as a primary generator and attractor of daily trips. Crucially, however, the study also revealed the simultaneous emergence of several new, highly active mobility centres situated in the southern, eastern, and western sectors of the city. Beyond mere population growth, these zones have undergone a significant expansion of commercial, service, and mixed-use developments, resulting in areas with their own OD dynamics. This commercial consolidation, coupled with the higher densities anticipated in the Municipal Development Plan, has reduced reliance on the historic centre for shopping, accessing services, or commuting. Consequently, these new centralities absorb a growing share of local demand and generate a trip volume comparable to that of the traditional city centre. Quantitatively, the analysis revealed that these peripheral centres collectively account for 30% of the city’s total daily trips, indicating a significant decentralisation of travel demand across the SMA. The outcome is an increasingly polycentric urban structure, where various sub-centres are emerging as key players in shaping mobility patterns.

This finding is crucial as it marks a shift in the region’s historical mobility patterns and underscores the need for a new transport planning strategy. Specifically, the results show that developing new cross-city corridors and direct routes is essential. These new connections will link the emerging hubs and ensure a more efficient transport system that is better suited to Saltillo’s evolving mobility dynamics.

What we learnt: mobility as an opportunity

The arrival of the new passenger train presents a significant opportunity for Saltillo to transition towards a new urban planning approach focused on public transport, allowing the city to adapt to its rapid expansion. The OD matrices developed by Nommon using MND are not merely diagnostic tools; they serve as an objective planning instrument, essential for the strategic reorganisation of the public transport system. This study has underscored the need for reliable data that facilitates the deepening of diagnostic insights and the comprehension of urban mobility patterns and trends. In this context, data derived from mobile phone networks have become an essential tool for generating these diagnostics.

A critical challenge facing transport planning and operations in Mexico is financial vulnerability. Business models governing public transport systems across the country are characterised by a high degree of vulnerability to variations in passenger demand. This financial fragility arises because fare revenue often constitutes the primary source of income, meaning that unpredictable or uneven demand directly compromises operational feasibility and long-term investment planning.

The precise, data-driven analytical insights derived from this study provide the municipal authorities in Saltillo with the necessary evidence base to develop a structurally sound and financially sustainable public transport system, allowing the local government to strategically plan routes and schedules, optimise resource allocation, and ensure greater long-term cost recovery.

An improved public transport system would efficiently connect the city’s various activity hubs — from industrial parks to commercial zones —, making it easier for people to reach their destinations. This strategy would make Saltillo more attractive for investment, boosting its competitiveness and establishing it as a role model for other Mexican cities facing similar challenges.

Lastly, these matrices offer utility far beyond initial planning: they serve as a baseline for setting future goals and measuring the impact of new projects. This supports a process of continuous, data-driven improvement of urban mobility, ensuring that Saltillo will maintain its position as one of the most competitive urban economies in Mexico.