Required Reading for Bogotá Breathers

'Dying for a breath of Bogotá Air', from The City Paper

Steve Hide's interesting piece on Bogotá's perpetual air pollution crisis in the June The City Paper gives a good illustration of Bogotá's impotent air quality enforcement. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find the article online.)

Too tough for environmental officials to identify?
A 'green' bus belches its way along Carrera 10.

My favorite part - for ironical reasons - is the quote from the Bogotá Environmental Secretariat official, who complains that "citizens don't know how to denounce" dirty vehicles, to the government's hotline. That's probably true, but it begs the question of why city environmental officials rely on the public instead of doing their job by stopping and fining these 'rolling smokestacks.'

Hide writes that in Quito, Ecuador he saw environmental officials testing buses' emissions. In my 13 years residence in Bogota, which has included countless hours pedaling the city's streets and avenues, I have not even once seen officials testing a bus's emissions.

Bogotá's air pollution is slow motion murder committed in everybody's plain site, every single day.

An exhaust pipe near Palo Quemao.

A woman gets blown away by a TransMilenio bus, icon of Bogotá.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours