transit nerd hour

Yesterday I learned, for the 27 thousandth time, that there is a split among transit planners between those who are a) pro-metro and tolerate the bus, and b) pro-bus and do not tolerate metros. This is following invariably by a discussion of all things bus rapid transit can accomplish that metro and light rail systems cannot. I’ve heard this so many times, along with that rant about how much better off the city of Bogotá is with TransMilenio, that I’m starting to get suspicious. Anytime someone has to invest this much effort convincing me of something supposedly so obvious, I start to wonder.

Not that I’m saying anything negative about TransMilenio (I think Arturo would kick me out of class for that – I think he’s a founding member of Friends of TM…), although it’s not as low polluting as it could/should be. I think it’s a good system though, especially for the money, and I can’t wait til it expands down two of the main drags, la Septima (7th Ave, connects the city center with the middle-class middle and the ritzy north end) and Highway 26th (the main street closest to me, cutting the city east/west). La Septima is the next phase, then 26th will get TransMilenio.

TransMilenio’s main red buses and supplementary green ones are all diesel, and so could potentially be converted to some kind of biodiesel down the road. They could also be converted to natural gas, but I’m told by the local guru Dario Hidalgo that this would only be financially feasible if Colombia eliminated the national gasoline subsidy. This does not appear likely in the near future, since it means jobs and money. TM runs full or near full most of the day, and at peak hours runs ridiculously full!

The density here in Bogotá is much, much higher than most places in the states, so I question whether this model could be replicated in different circumstances. Labor costs are also a big factor in the equation – wages being much lower here means TM can afford multiple station attendants, guards, and bus drivers, whereas metro systems save money on hiring employees because each train requires only one operator.

For point of comparison, Bogotá’s private buses (collectivos or busetas) move 7 million people daily. TM moves almost 800,000 people a day, which is tremendous, but the demand is much greater than it can handle. I think if they had built a metro system here along the same length of city space it would be moving a million trips a day, easy, given that 72% of Bogotá’s 7 plus million people (probably closer to 8-10 million) do not own cars. Can you imagine! But that’s just my uninformed opinion, and the great thing about TM for the city of Bogotá is that it was inexpensive. They built it on the cheap, and it shows in some of the stations, but in a city where the poverty rate is 50%, I think the decision was justified. The current mayor is focusing on anti-poverty initiatives, and he has been able to do so partly because TM is not proving to be a huge drain on city coffers.

And for my Atlanta transit geeks (actually all of this was for you!) headways range from 2 minutes peak to 6 minutes off peak. Not bad!