Bogotá Metro has a website, Instagram, a Twitter profile with 146,000 followers and even a group of friends on Facebook. But it doesn’t exist. No trains, no tracks, no stations. So far it was just an idea. A plan that the city began to forge in 1942 when it had 400,000 inhabitants. 80 years have passed, dozens of mayors and projects stored in drawers. The city grew to nearly eight million Bogotanos. The traffic turned into an eternal chaos. No one has ever seen a car drive. Citizens still raise eyebrows when asked about it, as if they wouldn’t believe it’s under construction now. The capital’s mayor, Claudia López, sounds emphatic after years of unfulfilled announcements: “The first line is not a dream, it is not a project, it is a contract that goes to 18%. The subway is going and going now”.
Progress in the Patio Taller, where trains are maintained and berthed, proves him right: work is underway, but it’s easy to forget. The noise around the country’s largest building continues. The plan has already gone through so many administrations that it has too many parents. The mayors who got their hands on the project – Gustavo Petro and Enrique Peñalosa – are still arguing about which would be better at this point. One of the two is now President Petro, so he has proposed another revision of the already agreed project.
The story comes from afar. Subway projects did not progress for 70 years. Either because the city government shut it down or because the national government stopped it. Money was never enough. It was a decade ago when it began to take shape. The current president was the mayor of Bogotá at the time. Juan Manuel Santos headed the national government. Petro made great progress on the underground subway project, even agreeing with Santos for a national contribution of 70% of the budget. But his tenure ended before that happened.
Then there are two versions. That of Petro saying he left the subway ready to build. And that of Peñalosa, who says that when they visited the mayor’s office, they saw that due to the devaluation of the peso in 2014, the project was no longer profitable when it came to costs and benefits. Reality runs through two key points: the Petro subway was never advertised, so it didn’t come armored to the next mayor’s office, and Peñalosa, for his part, advocated building an elevated line and prioritized its launch. of the Transmilenio, the articulated bus system that runs on its own tracks. When the second replaced the first, he embodied his project. And that fight between the two continues to this day.
Andrés Escobar, manager of the Metro Company with Peñalosa and at the beginning of López’s mayoralty, does not criticize Petro’s plan but claims that it was not feasible, at least in 2015: “It was not feasible. Not because the project was bad, but because of the devaluation and the operating costs.” The Santos government, Escobar says, has warned the new mayor that there will be no more money than his predecessor had been promised. So, Peñalosa and his team commissioned a comparison between the Metro’s Petro’s and the Peñalosa Elevated, which was 19% cheaper, which comes as no surprise. It is more expensive to tunnel and build underground than on the surface, and more expensive to maintain an underground subway, which requires artificial lighting and ventilation. The project was put out to tender and Apca Transmimetro, a Chinese consortium, won it. In the meantime, four years had passed and new elections were approaching in the city. The subway still only existed on paper maps.
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“I chose Claudia because she said she wouldn’t do the elevated train,” says a Colombian analyst today, clearly annoyed. During the election campaign, López assured that the underground was the better option. He even says it now. “I have a certain fondness for it being underground, Bogotá is already a city that has been made and built and is very dense,” he told EL PAÍS. But the contract for the first line was already signed when it arrived, and a withdrawal meant further delays. He assures that he has limited himself to continuing what has been advanced in order to solve a problem of decades as quickly as possible. In fact, the second subway line, already planned during her reign, will go underground – if she manages to get it tendered before she leaves the mayor’s office in January 2024.
Petro, who has been on a thousand fronts since he took office in August, is refusing to declassify the work. A few weeks ago, he met with the mayor to ask for information about the possibility of burying a section of the first line. The mayor’s office says they are exploring the possibility, and the Chinese consortium is running a parallel project to see what the additional cost would be. It will be presented to the President on January 16th. “The problem is whether it’s legally and financially viable with the existing contract,” says López.
Along the way, millions of pesos have been lost in projects and studies that will never see the light of day. Peñalosa continues to insist that it cannot be done underground due to Bogotá’s unstable soil, although it would technically be possible. The debate between them continues on Twitter and in public statements, confusing the populace who are still wondering: is the subway already being built or not?
what is today
The construction of the so-called first line of the Bogotá Metro has already begun and it is the elevated project that the Peñalosa government has completed. It is scheduled to go into operation in 2028. It will have 24 kilometers and 16 stations and is budgeted at 22.3 trillion pesos (about $4,675 million). Although everything could change next January if the president decides on the project being prepared by the Chinese consortium to create a section underground. It is the largest infrastructure under construction in the country. The second metro line, to be put out to tender in 2023 and whose construction must start in 2024, is scheduled to start operating in 2032. It is 15.4 kilometers long, has 11 stations and a budget of 34.93 billion pesos. But the subway is not the only construction site. There are a thousand open in the capital, 500 minors and 500 majors. Schools, hospitals, roads, aerial cables, green corridors… López assures that “the city will be different in 2032”, but until then we will have to suffer.
Bogota has lousy traffic. According to a Traffic Index study, it is the fourth worst city in the world in terms of vehicle traffic and first in Latin America. This means that every citizen of Bogota loses 126 hours per year in traffic jams, which accounts for 55% of delays on routes. The works will make transit more difficult, but the city’s mobility problems require new infrastructure. City buses are inefficient and the Transmilenio service introduced by Peñalosa alleviated some of the problem in the early 2000s, but today it is also inadequate and people travel in crowded vehicles.
The subway seems to be starting, but in this story it’s better not to be forceful. EL PAÍS already published in 2017 that the construction of the first line would start in 2019 if there were no new obstacles. And there was. Now the start of the work is certain, but until then you can say. The Peñalosa project could still include the Petro project.
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