Encounters and disencounters in the transport system on the South Bank of the Tagus Estuary: on the difficulties of establishing intermodal Transport in a region

Using a concept that has only recently entered the dictionar- ies while writing transport history has its manifest risks. Nevertheless the aims of this article is to emphasize that the decisions taken or the impossibility of implementing them at various stages in the past, have an influence on the facility or the difficulty in turning the concept into reality in the present. The case study is the relation between urban expansion and the growth of the transport capacity since 1850 in the south bank of the Tagus, in face of Lisbon. Since that time steamboats linked Cacilhas to Lisbon but the planned railroads were never installed in this district. Thus urban growth was related to bus connections and, since the sixties to the use of private motorcars. Intermodal stations imagined at the end of the nineteenth century could only be a reality after 1999. The train was that year finally installed in the bridge but it could no long shape the urban form