She scraped together enough money to pay off local gangs for a plot of land on a precarious slope. There I met a 60-year-old woman named Maria Victoria Vélez, who, a decade ago, was chased with her children from the countryside by warring armies, and sought refuge in Bogotá. Its population is now roughly the size of the city of Miami. Like many informal settlements, it arose with no plan, one cinder-block-and-corrugated-metal house at a time. On the mountainous outskirts of Bogotá sprawls a neighborhood called Ciudad Bolívar. Maria Victoria Vélez near her home in Ciudad Bolívar. The stolen money was supposed to go for TransMilenio and new roads. Those first 71 miles of bus lanes were supposed to grow into 241 miles, but the additional miles were never built.Īs promises were broken, and service declined, one mayor became linked to a scheme to embezzle millions of dollars and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. After Peñalosa, a succession of mayors at first pushed TransMilenio along, and then increasingly neglected it. They also suffered the whims of constantly shifting city administrations. The very popularity of the buses made them crowded and dangerous. Not long after TransMilenio’s first flush of success, riders began to find themselves packed into sweltering sardine cans, which broke down and were poorly policed. It is also among the city’s most embattled institutions. Today Bogotá’s rapid bus system serves about two million riders a day. TransMilenio rapid buses parked at a terminal.īut that wasn’t the end of the story. After only several months in operation, ridership had doubled. Passengers paid in advance, boarding through all doors, radically speeding up the boarding process.Ĭrucially, the bus network knitted formerly disconnected slums and other far-flung, underserved districts of Bogotá with the city’s center. TransMilenio’s stations resembled those for trains. They took over lanes on existing boulevards, making limited stops and moving more quickly than the ragtag fleets of notoriously accident-prone microbuses they replaced, which were operated by countless uncoordinated companies. The new rapid buses weren’t as fast as a metro, but they were up and running in a fraction of the time and at a vastly lower cost. Bogotá’s more extensive network of 12 bus lines covered 71 miles. It hit on a dull but slyly effective strategy to move millions of commuters: rapid buses.Ĭalled TransMilenio, Bogotá’s bus system took inspiration from the city of Curitiba, Brazil, which instituted one of the first successful rapid bus networks. Le Corbusier’s reconfiguration imagined comfortably accommodating an anticipated influx of as many as 1.5 million people by the turn of the 21st century.įor a brief shining instant in the early 2000s, it even looked as if the city had solved the great mobility riddle. With American encouragement and money, Bogotá rid itself of its trains and went all in on cars and a spaghetti entanglement of new roads. During a moment of optimism, the city invited the famous Swiss architect Le Corbusier to design a master plan that envisioned a sprawling spiderweb of modern highways to replace the city’s trams and regional railroads. In the 1940s and ’50s, about 600,000 people lived in Colombia’s capital, a mile and a half up in the Andes. Gridlock sounds like a relatively minor problem compared with the first-order crises that cities have to address, like lack of housing or clean water, but its ripple effects on employment, sleep, mental health, child care and education, among other issues, are profound. And city streets and transit systems, not built to anticipate the masses of recent arrivals, have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of cars, trucks and privately operated minibuses. The newcomers, like other residents, need to move around to reach jobs and schools. Over many decades - especially in developing parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America - millions of people fleeing war, natural disasters and poverty have settled into barrios, favelas and slums on the sprawling fringes of already strained cities. Headway is an initiative from The New York Times exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress.
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