Carrera Septima's Warning

The new Septima is taking shape...but still has a ways to go.

Is anybody surprised? The pedestrianization of the few blocks of Carrera Septima between the Plaza Bolivar and Jimenez Ave. was supposed to be finished by February. But the project has been prolonged three times now, and is now projected to be completed in August. Undoubtedly, the project's price tag has similarly elevated.

Workers prepare the street's foundation. The excavation
uncovered the part of the old streetcar tracks.

Certainly, the pedestrianization will be a huge improvement, of course, transforming a chaotic, noisy, polluted avenue into a pleasant place for walking, shopping and watching street performers.

But the project's price tag should serve as a warning for advocates of building a subway in Bogotá. Such as project will be infinitely more complex and expensive. Does anybody really believe that it won't take lots longer than the official projections, or cost a whole lot more.

A metro, just like the pedestrian-friendly Carrera Septima, will be great to have. But Bogotá shouldn't embrace the metro based on false or unrealistic premises.

The new street will be nice - once it's completed.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The 'Miracle' Metro

A jammed Bogotá road. Is a subway the solution?

It will reduce commute times, traffic congestion, pollution - and even crime and health problems, while saving Bogotá millions of dollars.

Those are some of the claims made by backers of a 15 trillion peso Bogotá subway line in a recent study by the company Teknidata, hired by the city's Urban Development Institute, the IDU.

A Bogotá bus belches smoke. Has anybody
thot of enforcing emissions laws?

But many of those claims look dubious from a glance at Latin American capitals such as Mexico City, Santiago, Chile and Caracas, Venezuela, all of which have much more extensive subway systems than Bogotá could have for decades - and still suffer from horrific pollution and traffic jams.

The reason is simple: Induced traffic demand. Opening up road space, by either building more roads or taking cars off of the roads using mass transit, will reduce traffic jams....for a while. But new drivers, seeing that wonderful open asphalt, will decide to make more trips. So, traffic ends up just as bad, or even worse.

This is not to say that a subway's a bad thing. In fact, it's an excellent thing for the many thousands of people who use it every day to get where they're going quickly underneath the traffic jams.

Will Bogotá's metro look this good?

But the question for a cash-strapped city isn't whether a metro would be a good thing (a space port, after all, would also be a good thing), but whether it's the most cost-efficient way to accomplish the city's goals. And a subway looks rather like the most expensive way to maybe achieve its goals:

Reduce traffic congestion? Rather than spending trillions of pesos digging up the city for a subway, Bogotá could reduce congestion AND make money by creating a London-style congestion charge. Such a charge would raise the cost of and thus disincentivize driving. More people car-pool, take buses, ride bikes or simply don't make that unnecessary trip, and traffic jams are reduced (and so is pollution).

Reduce pollution? This one's almost too obvious to be worth explaining. Bogotá has a bad air pollution problem. Bogotá also doesn't bother to enforce emission laws. Wouldn't enforcing the law be a good first step toward reducing pollution, rather than pretending a subway will do it a decade from now - by which time the city will be inundated with many thousands more polluting vehicles?

As for reducing crime, the newspaper article doesn't bother to explain this, and I won't try.

Bogotá's leadership is fixated on building not only any metro but the most expensive kind; a subway. And not because it's the best transit option, but - it seems to me - because other big cities have subways, and Bogotá wants to feel important. Incidentally, subway construction will also mean huge, juicy contracts for infrastructure companies.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Now It's Official: Bogotá Can't Afford a Subway

Coming to Bogotá? Seattle was digging a car tunnel under the city, but the huge digging machine got stuck, obliging the city to dig this huge pit to reach and repair the machine. (Photo: Grist)

First, its price tag zoomed up to 15 billion pesos. Then, the price of oil, which once provided more than half of Colombia's export income, took a dive. And now, the national government has explained to Bogotá that it won't be able to ante up its traditional 70% of the project's cost.

A map of Bogotá's proposed first subway line. 

And that's all before the inevitable cost over-runs, corruption scandals and other problems even start.

For decades, Bogotá has dreamed of building a subway, but never figured out a way to pay for it.

Bogotá leaders seem to want to have a subway more for reasons of status than of practicality. After
all, a subway is about the most expensive sort of mass transit and takes the longest time to build.

Bogotá wants a subway for two mistaken reasons:

    A) Bogotanos believe that a tunnel will cure its traffic jams.

A traffic jam on Calle 26.
A subway line won't solve this.

Perhaps they should visit capitals such as Caracas, Mexico City and Santiago, Chile, to see whether their subway networks have eliminated traffic jams there. (Bogotá, of course, would at most have a single line a decade from now.)

    B) Bogotá wants to be a world-class city like New York, London and Paris.

Perhaps Bogotá leaders would do well to see that being a world class city means much more than having an underground train. It means having a strong, varied, economy, world-class universities, impressive parks and architecture, great culture, science, little corruption, and on and on. Bogotá still has a long way to go.

Rather than recognizing that a subway is beyond reach, and focusing on faster, cheaper forms of transit, such as light rail, elevated rail or more bus rapid transit, Bogotá is scrambling for other financing formulas. The city will dig itself into a massive debt and have to suspend other, more pressing transit projects. By the time a subway line is finally finished - if that day comes - the city will be overwhelmed by car traffic and the streets gridlocked.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Auto Show's Dirty Secret

New cars shown in the auto show in Corferias...
(Photo: Corferias)

...will soon be trapped in Bogotá's traffic jams.

Bogotá's annual big auto show is going on now in the Corferias convention center. What they won't show you, tho, is the congested, chaotic reality out on Bogotá's streets. And each additional car sold here will worsen that situation.

By 2020, the number of private cars in Bogotá is predicted to double. The city doesn't have room.

The unaffordable subway which Mayor Petro and Pres. Santos seem determined to build won't unravel the traffic jams. Neither will building and expanding avenues, which only encourages more driving. What Bogotá needs, in addition to more expensive gasoline, is a congestion charge, which would pay for transit and discourage unnecessary private car use.

A shiny car waits for a buy in Corferias....
(Photo: Caracol.com.co)

In today's El Tiempo, Jaime Lerner, ex-mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, calls private cars "the cigarette of the future." If people have cars at all, he says, they should be used only for recreation, not for city driving.

...will soon be waiting in a traffic jam like this one.

A new car in Corferias...
(Photo: Caracol.com.co)

...will make the same old traffic jams even worse. 

Waiting in the showroom...
(Photo: Caracol.com.co)

...to wait on the street.

Looks nice, huh?
(Photo: Corferias)

Stewing in traffic. Not so nice.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Oil Crisis

Just a few weeks ago, when Bogotá announced the astronomical cost of its planned subway, experts said the city couldn't pay for it without cutting back on other major projects or lots of money from the national government.

Since then, the nation's financial prospects have gone south.

While Colombia is not often thot of as an oil exporter, it is. In October, in fact, Colombian petroleum production averaged 1 million barrels per day - almost one-third the production of neighbor Venezuela and more than double the production of Ecuador, both OPEC members.

As a result, the global drop in oil and gasoline prices which has drivers celebrating is bad news for the environment, urban liveability - and for Bogotá's prospects for building a subway.

To be clear, Bogotá's subway plan is exactly the worst possible way to build mass transit. Burying its train system undergound will mean slower construction and higher cost. Bogotá would get much more transit for its money by building either a surface level or an elevated train track, while meanwhile expanding the TransMilenio system and creating more bus-only lanes.

But city leaders appear fixated on the most expensive, underground alternative - which makes one wonder whether some hidden agenda's at work.

However, swooning world oil prices could make the subway, which would require central government financing, an impossibility.

Colombia is not a major world oil producer, but it nevertheless gets between 40% and 50% of its export revenue comes from oil (and more from gas and coal), far more than Colombia's iconic export, coffee. Ecopetrol, the state oil company, has long been a national cash cow.

The global oil price decline, which is likely to last for reasons detailed below, means a several-point drop in Colombia's GDP, For reasons detailed below, oil prices are likely to stay low for a good while, forcing Colombia to either find new sources of income, or cut its budget.

Less revenue will mean less money for schools, police, parks, health care and big infrastructure projects such as Bogotá's planned metro. And there's little Colombia can do about it. If Colombia attempts to export more oil, as other petroleum producers are doing, it will only push world prices down further.

What Colombia could do is diversify its economy, and replace raw materials with manufactured goods, which put lots more money into workers' hands and are less subject to price fluctuations. I am perpetually amazed that Colombia, with its cheap labor and resources, still imports things like clothing from China.

Unlike previous oil price drops, this one shows no sign of reversing anytime soon. China's economic growth is slowing and Europe seems stuck in recession. Meanwhile, Iraq and Libya are returning to oil production, and the planet's swing producer, Saudi Arabia, gives no sign of closing the tap. The Saudis are probably using oil as a weapon, since their arch-enemy Iran's oil is more expensive to pump out of the ground and refine. Lower world prices will also make marginal wells in places like Canada unprofitable, reducing production in the long run. (And Venezuela will get hit even harder.)

Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro rants against "savage" fracking techniques, because they threaten his nation's insane, populist spending, including giving away free gasoline. I wonder whether he means 'savage' in contrast to gentle, civilized traditional oil production methods involving deforesting rainforest, setting off explosives underground, drilling holes deep into the earth and then burning that petroleum in the atmosphere?

At the same time that Middle Eastern countries are racing to pump their oil, the U.S. is moving whole hog into fracking, creating an production boom there. The fracking boom looks only likely to expand to places like England and Colombia, and inevitably China and Russia. That may mean 'Game Over' for Planet Earth's climate, but before that happens it'll devastate lots of oil producers' budgets, and put lots of infrastructure projects on hold

To escape this trap, Colombia needs to diversify its economy from raw materials.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Higher Train, Lower Price Tag

A ride with a view from Medellin's metro. Why pay more to bury a train line underground? (Photo: Colombia Travel)

Bogotá underworld is a crowded place: power lines, natural gas pipes, sewers, building foundations and lot and lots of loose earth, because Bogotá was built on top of a wetland.

That's a very, very inconvenient place to try to build a train line.

But above Bogotá, there's a lot of....empty space.

Urban trauma: Subway construction in Toronto, Canada.
(Photo: UrbanToronto.ca)

As many analysts have pointed out, the most expensive and slowest place to put a train line is exactly where Bogotá plans to: Underground. Ex-Mayor Enrique Peñalosa says so in a long essay in today's El Tiempo. And the other day an official from Medellin, whose own train line is partially underground, said it clearly: "It's not viable at all...Building an underground subway line is crazy."

An elevated train costs lots less to build and to maintain than does an underground line. (And a ground level train is even cheaper.) That's a fundamental factor for Bogotá, which can't figure out where it'll find the estimated $7.5 billion dollar price tag of the first underground subway line. (The cost is equivalent to the city's whole annual budget.)

A ride in an elevated train line is also lots more pleasant. I grew up mostly in the San Francisco,

Riding in the sun. A BART train pulls into a station. (Photo: NBC Bay Area)

California Bay Area, which has a regional train system called BART. Various BART segments run underground, on the surface and on elevated tracks, and I can tell you that when a train emerges from a tunnel it's like a breath of fresh air: Sunlight replaces fluorescent lights and views of the city and mountains replace gloomy black tunnel walls. Cellphone reception improves, too.

So, more people will ride an elevated train - and enjoy it a lot more.

And it's no secret that one of Bogota's big drivers for building a subway line is status. That's why city leaders keep repeating that Bogotá's the only big Latin American city without a metro, and one of only a couple of cities its size in the world without one. Peer pressure is a bad reason to do anything. But, if what Bogotá wants is status, then building a shiny, visible above-ground train line will do lots more for the city's image than would burying that train under ground.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Putting the Metro into Context

Cars block TransMilenio buses on Calle 13 y Carrera 10 today. The cop doesn't seem to care.

A massive traffic jam on Carrera 30.

 The ongoing mania about building a metro system - undoubtedly the salvation of the city! - might make us forget there's lots more important and immediate steps city leaders could take tomorrow to make Bogotá liveable. The subway's first line alone is projected to take 10 years to build and cost $7.5 billion - approximately the city's annual budget - and that's before the inevitable delays and cost overruns.

Meanwhile, is there anything the city could do to make transit sane?

I'll leave it to you to decide whether fining drivers who stop in the middle of intersections and discouraging private car use (read: a congestion charge) would get traffic moving.

Remember that if they do build the planned subway system, by the time the first line's finished a decade from now, the number of private cars in the city will have more than doubled, and many other transit projects will have been postponed or cancelled in order to provide funds for the subway.
By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Will a Subway Bury Bogotá?

Traffic backed-up on Calle 26.

Bogotá wants a subway. Whether it's a good idea or not is almost irrelevant. After all, Bogotá is the

A map of the proposed first
Metro line in Bogotá.

largest city in Latin America and one of the few of its size in the world without a subway system. So, status and appearance are arguments enough.

A traffic jam in La Candelaria.

But just the first line of the planned subway, running mostly north-south along Bogotá's eastern border, is projected to cost some $7.5 billion - but will surely overrun that - and Bogotá officials don't know how the city can pay for it.

What worries urban planners is that Bogotá will suspend nearly all other transit work in order to pay for the dreamed-of metro line.

Unfortunately, by the time a first metro line gets built, perhaps 10 to 15 years from now, the number of cars in Bogotá will have more than doubled, making city's already huge traffic jams gargantuan.

But there is a solution to both aspects of this crisis - the London-style congestion charge which Mayor Petro said he'd create, but hasn't moved forward. Such a charge would both reduce the use of private cars, which occupy most of Bogotá's road space, and also help finance that much-desired metro line.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The First Signs of Bogotá's Subway

You've probably seen tents like these, on Carrera 10, around town. They're obtaining core samples to study the soil's characteristics to see how best to dig the tunnels for Bogotá's planned subway.

According to projections, tunnel digging will start in late 2015 and the first trains will roll in 2020.

But does anybody really believe that? TransMilenio construction has experienced delay after delay, mismanagement and corruption scandals. Why should we expect subway construction to be any different - except on a much larger scale? And that's without considering the possibility of an economic slide which could leave the project unfinished.

Bogotá's metro is also being marketed with false promises. The government website Metro of Bogotá makes several predictions:

With a subway there'll be fewer cars on the street. - Have these people, I wonder, ever visited Santiago, Chile, Mexico City, or Caracas, Venezuela? All those cities have metros - and also horrendous traffic congestion. It's well documented that each time a car is removed from the street it only provides incentive for another car to use that space. And, remember that the number of private cars in Bogotá is exploding. If a subway reduces traffic congestion, it will only be for a short time.

With a subway, Bogotá will have cleaner air - Well, perhaps - if they finally remove those ancient buses from the streets. A subway will certainly reduce demand for buses along some corridors. But the space freed up will be grabbed by more private cars and trucks - which will pollute the air. And, if the influx of cheap, highly polluting Chinese and Korean vehicles continues, Bogotá's air may continue getting dirtier.

The drilling work leaves annoying and
slightly dangerous afterthoughts
like these protruding metal bars.

With a subway, Bogotá will be a denser city - That's probably true, since developments such as retail, offices and housing tends to concentrate along transit corridors, which is good. But the question here is not whether a subway will be nice to have, which nobody disputes, but whether it's the best option for the city. There are other ways to densify the city, without the need for a hugely expensive mega-construction project that will tear up central Bogotá for a decade. (But it's also worth observing that, by moving people underground, a subway can suck life from the street.)

The planned subway line. 

With a subway, Bogotá will have more income - Again, probably true. But the cost for that income is immense. The question Bogotá needs to ask is not whether a subway will be useful, but whether its cost could be better invested in light rail, more TransMilenio expansion, or even schools, parks and hospitals.

That said, here's one big thing in favor of a subway line. According to this website a subway can carry more
than ten times as many people per hour as can a bus rapid transit line.

But I don't think that Bogotá's subway decision is being made based on logistics as much as on status. Bogotá wants to be a Big Important City, and Big Important Cities have subways. Therefore, Bogotá must have a subway.

So, hold on for the ride. Between now and the day, sometime in the 2020s, when the first train cruises underneath Bogotá, expect huge holes in the ground and - even huger delays and scandals.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Metro System Will Solve Our Ills?

 

A subway train in Santiago, Chile....

This week, the World Bank gave the go-ahead for final studies for a subway line for Bogotá, which

...and a traffic jam in Santiago de Chile.

 tentatively would run from Kennedy in the city's southwest to Usaquen in its northeast.

A subway, if it's actually built, will be great for those who use it. But for those who believe it'll solve the city's worsening traffic jams, I've posted these photos from other Latin American cities which do have subways.

If Bogotá does go ahead with its first subway line, which is supposed to measure 27 kms and will cost billions of dollars, let's brace for a decade of urban upheaval, corruption scandals, cost over-runs and, and, of course, traffic jams.

That's not to say that a subway isn't a good idea. But, as ADN headlined, 'The World Bank Believes that Bogotá is Unsustainable for the Enormous Use of the Car.' To reduce traffic jams, Bogotá needs to limit the use of the private car. Pico y Placa has failed. The solution is a London-style congestion charge.

New vehicles pero 1,000 people in 2009. As Colombian car ownership escalates, cities will become unsustainable, unless governments take strong measure to reduce private car use.

A metro train in Mexico City, Mexico....

...and a traffic jam in Mexico City.

A map of the Mexico City subway system. In a decade, Bogotá might have a single line.

Sao Paulo's shiny subway....

...and Sao Paulo's terrible traffic jams.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours