Car-Free Day in Bogota

Today was Bogotá, Colombia’s eighth ¨Car-Free Day.¨ The day promoting the use of transportation alternatives was initiated in 2000 by then-mayor Enrique Peñalosa, and approved by a wide margin in a voter referendum. And when I say wide margin…keep in mind 75% of Bogotanos use public transportation as their only means of getting around. Here that’s no cause for pity, though – buses are so plentiful that the city government has been trying to get ride of thousands of them since the official transit system, TransMilenio, was built. Today the system carries some 700,000 trips per day.

Car-Free Day in Bogotá is not optional. Personal vehicles, with a few exceptions, are simply not allowed in the city between 7 AM and 7 PM. People ride their bicycles on the separate bike lanes that criss-cross the city, take one of the thousands of buses or taxis, ride TransMilenio, and walk. By now the day has come to feel much like any other, just a little easier to cross the street on the way to the bakery, work, school, or home.

In Bogotá, the challenges facing public transportation, while sharing some common roots with those facing Atlanta, are characterized by a completely different context. In Bogotá, as in Atlanta, the streetcar tracks were torn up and replaced with buses, but unlike Atlanta, the public company was unable to satisfy demand for mass transit, and because most people could not afford private automobiles, a large number of private operators sprung up to meet the need. Today 77.42% of Bogotanos always use public transportation to get around (6,193,600 people), and only 17.9% of Bogotanos have personal vehicles (1,432,000 people).

Yet a University of Los Andes professor known for his work on public transportation, Arturo Ardila, thinks there is actually a surplus of buses in the city today. He notes that bus ridership has been declining since at least 1990, and that most buses operate at low efficiency, which has caused them to raise fares, passing on this cost to the riders. Streets are extremely congested but traffic generally keeps moving. Poor traffic safety and pollution are two costs that plague Bogotá (and Atlanta, for that matter).

At the same time, one can step out onto any major street and almost immediately find a bus going to one’s destination. The fares, while rising at rates much higher than inflation (over 100% for buses older than 6 years) are still fairly low, some 27 cents during the day. Also, public transportation vehicles use a quarter of the roadways, while personal cars consume 40%, mostly with one person aboard (Secretaría de Tránsito y Transporte de Bogotá).

With the building of its bus rapid transit system, TransMilenio, Bogotá has been trying to buy up old, polluting buses to reduce both the total number of buses circulating on city streets and to decrease their harsh environmental impact. From some 25,000 buses in 2003, buses number 18,600 today, but the city has confronted political pressure from the owners of the bus routes (generally mid to large-sized companies). Bus owners themselves tend to be small businessmen and women – surprisingly given the number of buses, owning one is actually a money-losing enterprise. This helps explain why owners keep their buses in operation way beyond their expected life – they only start to make money in their tenth year!
Bogota is not only trying to change the way people experience the city on their way to work – every Sunday, every single Sunday, 120 kilometers of the main city streets close to motor vehicle traffic so that people can bicycle, run, and walk along them without fear.