Mexico City bets on bus rapid transit

In the early summer of 2005, Mexico City motorists were more than skeptical as workers placed bright yellow traffic lane dividers along one of the capital's main arteries, Insurgentes Avenue.

The city was about to launch its first bus rapid transit (BRT) line and the yellow markers signaled that the inside lane of the avenue would soon be a no-go zone for all other vehicles.

"They're taking away a lane!" an angry taxi driver complained at the time. To most drivers, reserving a lane exclusively for the novel mass transit system seemed counterintuitive. They wanted more blacktop to relieve bumper-to-bumper traffic, not less.

But over the past decade, the system, here called Metrobus, has proven to work and in Mexico City's drive to improve its mass transit network, BRT is playing a starring role.

Before the Metrobus marks its 10th anniversary on June 19, the city plans to launch its sixth route. In another year or two, the network will mark another milestone when its buses make their debut on the city's fashionable Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico's answer to the Champs Elysees.

The city "has significant plans to continue building lines," said Adriana Lobo, executive director of EMBARQ Mexico, part of a global network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that aims to promote "sustainable mobility" in some of the world's most gridlocked cities, including China's Beijing, India's Ahmedabad, Turkey's Istanbul, Peru's Lima and Brazil's Curitiba.

At least another five or six lines are planned as Mexico City looks to approximately double its BRT network from the current 120 km to over 200 km.

Mexico's experience with BRT, it would seem, has been a success.

"You have to describe a system that on average cuts travel time, pollution and accidents by 30 to 50 percent, as a major success," said Lobo.

The BRT does that by running along dedicated lanes reserved exclusively for its buses, meaning they don't have to battle other vehicles on the road, except maybe at intersections, and can travel relatively free of traffic.

It also eliminates more than 20,000 car trips a day, since at least 6 percent of passengers used to drive cars, according to the Metrobus website. The savings in fuel translates into a reduction of 122,000 tons of CO2 a year, according to EMBARQ.

More importantly, the system has helped reduce road accidents in a country with notoriously high road traffic deaths.

Some 22,000 people die in fatal crashes and roadway accidents each year throughout Mexico, according to Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is working globally to combat the problem.

The cost to the city amounts to 6 billion pesos (about 400 million U.S. dollars), to the country, 150 billion pesos (about 10 billion dollars), says Mexico Previene, an NGO that promotes safe practices on roads, in industry and other fields.

"BRT can make mobility safer by providing accessible and efficient infrastructure for moving people, not cars," the World Bank's director of Transport and Information and Communications Technologies Global Practice, Jose Luis Irigoyen, wrote in a Jan. 14 article that cited the experience of Mexico's second-largest city, Guadalajara.

"Normal traffic lanes in Guadalajara ... saw 726 crashes in 2011," he wrote, while the city's BRT, called Macrobus, "saw only six accidents in the same year."

Bus priority systems "can improve traffic safety, reducing injuries and fatalities by as much 50 percent, seen in cities like Guadalajara and Ahmedabad," he added.

In addition to Mexico City and Guadalajara, at least four other cities in Mexico have launched BRT lines, including the northern cities of Leon, which was the first to experiment with the system, Monterrey and Chihuahua. More are planning to follow suit.

Part of the reason BRT systems are safer is that they impose order, with a well-marked route, established stops or stations, and a timetable.

Before Mexico City's first BRT line began running along Insurgentes, the city's main north-south axis, commuters mainly traveled up and down the avenue on rickety minibuses, variously known as peseros, because they used to cost a peso, and microbuses or colectivos.

Resembling tin shoe boxes on wheels, peseros, which still run amok in most other parts of the city, stop whenever and wherever a passenger hails them, often swerving to the curb from an outside lane to pick up a fare. Largely unregulated, they're often so old, you can see the asphalt go by through holes in the rusty metal floors and hear the chassis creak as passengers climb in.

What's more, each pesero or group of peseros has a different owner, so it's not uncommon to see two peseros racing each other to see who gets to the next passenger first, much to the horror of those on board.

"They're a disaster," said Lobo. "The orderliness (of the Metrobus) is considerable compared to the chaos there was before. On Insurgentes, there used to be 265 microbuses that belonged to 220 different micro-firms, plus 100 buses that were operated by a public company."

Today, most BRT routes are operated by a combination of three to five public and private enterprises.

"It's much more feasible to organize three companies than 220 micro-firms," said Lobo. "This degree of organization has really transformed the landscape."

Still, the system has its critics.

Even the Metrobus website asks users somewhat menacingly: " Remember the microbuses and buses that used to run on Insurgentes? "

"We liked our trees," lamented a resident by the name of Silvia on the Metrobus website's suggestions and complaints section, complaining about a BRT line that "razed hundreds of trees" during its construction phase.

By far the biggest complaint, however, has to do with the overcrowded conditions, either on board a Metrobus or inside the stations.

"We're always packed in like sardines," wrote Dana Garcia about riding the bus, while Neli Sanchez said "every morning from 8 to 10 a.m. the Ayuntamiento station is bursting at the seams."

"The Metrobus is partly a victim of its own success," said Lobo. "It's fast and efficient, so we're seeing a higher demand than was initially estimated."

The Insurgentes line alone carries more than 450,000 passengers a day, nearly half of the approximately million commuters that use the city's BRT network on a daily basis.

"After Lines 1, 2 and 3 of the Metro (subway), it's the line that carries the most number of passengers. It's doing the work of a subway line, warts and all. Anyone who has taken Lines 1, 2 and 3 (of the subway) knows we don't always ride comfy and roomy. That is a problem of mass transit systems and one the city will have to gradually resolve by offering more alternatives," Lobo said.

The solution doesn't lie in any single mode of transportation, she believes, but in an integrated mass transit system that provides residents with more choices, including the Metrobus, the subway and bicycle stations.

The Metro is clearly the backbone of the city's mass transit network, transporting more than 4.6 million people a day, quickly and fairly safely, for 5 pesos, only a peso less than the Metrobus.

In a 2009 survey of Metrobus users, 85 percent of riders said the system was better than the microbuses and buses they used before, but only 49 percent said it was better than the subway.

But a new subway line costs 20 times more than a new Metrobus line to build, so expanding the underground system places a huge burden on the city's finances.

The subway also has other drawbacks. The network is limited in its reach, and a seemingly never-ending string of vendors and beggars ply the trains, bellowing to be heard over the din of rails and conversation.

Israel Carreno, 21, is an office worker who has used the Insurgentes line for the past five years to shuttle between his home and workplace, at 8 a.m. and again around 1 p.m.

"It's the only transit system close to my house," he said, as he was waiting at the Francia station for the next bus. "Sometimes the bus takes a long time to arrive at the station, but in general the service is pretty good." Endite