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A picture and a thousand words
Choked by traffic and pollution, a city tries to save its transit system from being `a poor system of transport for the poor'
Jan 27, 2008 04:30 AM
Augusta Dwyer
Special to the Star
Mexico City disappears into a haze of fog.
MEXICO CITY–On the rare clear day here, the view from my rooftop is one of an ocean of fractured cement occasionally lapping up against the bulge of rounded hills and volcanoes, the largest of them all furthest away and enclosing the valley like a gigantic, jagged wall.
Almost everything about the Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City is oversized, multitudinous and demanding, starting with its population. Below me, almost 20 million people are working or studying or doing whatever they do, producing one-quarter of the country's Gross Domestic Product. A great many of them are stuck in traffic.
While 5.5 million people ride the city's ever-expanding subway system each day, another 12 million travel on above-ground public transport – a motley variety of almost 32,000 buses, micro-buses and vans – along its 13,000 kilometres of streets and highways.
Then there are the taxis –180,000 of them according to Armando Quintero, the city's Secretary of Transport and Roads – and the 3.5 million cars.
"The numbers are incredible," he admits. "It's hard to find anything similar anywhere else in the world."
In fact, during the morning rush hour, traffic on the two 12-lane freeways, the Periferico and the Interior Circuit, moves at an average of eight kilometres an hour, and 12 kilometres an hour everywhere else. Little wonder it can take people as long as three hours to travel to work or school.
What's more, "There are 350,000 new cars added to the traffic every year in the metropolitan zone," says Quintero, who calls this situation "the dictatorship of the vehicle."
The effect of them all is notorious: Mexico City has some of the worst air quality in the world. Most of the time my view of the urban valley isn't of buildings but rather a blanket of smog.
Yet when the Spanish conquistadors arrived here in 1521, they found an extraordinary community of some 300,000 people, living on an island surrounded by five lakes; the remnants of two are all that is left of them. Rivers and canals threaded the metropolis and canoes were the most common method of transport.
Even as late as 1856, one visitor described Mexico as "one of the most beautiful cities of the New World," enjoying a "healthy and temperate climate, and a sky of admirable purity and transparency."
"I knew this city as a city of trees, surrounded by large meadows and cornfields," says long-time public broadcaster Virgilio Caballero, 65. When he was a boy, the city had a population of less than 2 million.
"On my way to school, we children would pick cactus leaf, right in the neighbourhood, and lambs' quarters from the river banks, because the water was very clean."
Since the Spanish conquest, however, city authorities have made draining the valley a priority. In Caballero's lifetime, "16 rivers were cemented over so cars could use them," he says. "It was terrible, like something out of a horror film."
Today, the world's largest drainage system – 52 kilometres of massive drains and another 160 kilometres of secondary drains – flushes away rainwater and sewage into the Panuco River and, eventually, the Gulf of Mexico.
The city now gets its water from underground sources, using 36,000 litres per second; about a third of that is lost to leakages. As a consequence, the whole place is sinking at a rate of 10 centimetres a year.
Incredibly, city residents were only allowed to vote for mayor in 1997. Until then, the central government appointed a party stalwart to run things, often for political gain.
The new mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, is unafraid of change. While the previous mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, spent billions on a series of raised highways running on top of the existing ones, Ebrard plans to shell out similar quantities on public transport.
The idea, says Quintero, is to transform the transit system "so that it is no longer a poor system of transport for the poor."
Devised in 2005 by Mexico's Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Mario Molina, the dedicated lane for the Metrobuses will be lengthened to a total of 29 kilometres. Ebrard will construct nine more such corridors, which will move up to 1.7 million passengers a day.
Better yet, he is also putting the kibosh on the private-transport sector's rattletrap collection of microbuses. Overcrowded, unsafe and prone to clogging traffic as they trawl the streets for passengers, their owners are being forced to ditch them for larger buses that are obliged to stop at demarcated stops.
The 21,000 tonnes of garbage Mexico City produces every day will be turned into biogas energy in the next two years, while Caballero is working on a way to give the entire city wireless Internet access.
Some urban planners even envision bringing back the lakes.
"It's feasible, technically and economically," says architect Alberto Kalach, "so it's just a question of political will."
While he estimates that 10,000 hectares are available for flooding, "that land is invaded by an average of 30 families every day."
Yet even as Mexico City has spread like a giant amoeba into 35 municipalities in neighbouring states, it manages to celebrate its humanity in small ways.
Little boys still take homemade parachutes and watch them rise in the draft from the subway grills in the Zocalo. Families from the outlying districts take their children boating on the lake in Chapultepec Park. Even the poorest families throw lively parties in their small cement yards to celebrate life's milestones: the birth of a baby, third and 15th birthdays, weddings and anniversaries.
Amid the sprawling traffic and the daily blanket of smog, it remains, at heart, a city of trees, large meadows and cornfields.
Choked by traffic and pollution, a city tries to save its transit system from being `a poor system of transport for the poor'
Jan 27, 2008 04:30 AM
Augusta Dwyer
Special to the Star
Mexico City disappears into a haze of fog.
MEXICO CITY–On the rare clear day here, the view from my rooftop is one of an ocean of fractured cement occasionally lapping up against the bulge of rounded hills and volcanoes, the largest of them all furthest away and enclosing the valley like a gigantic, jagged wall.
Almost everything about the Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City is oversized, multitudinous and demanding, starting with its population. Below me, almost 20 million people are working or studying or doing whatever they do, producing one-quarter of the country's Gross Domestic Product. A great many of them are stuck in traffic.
While 5.5 million people ride the city's ever-expanding subway system each day, another 12 million travel on above-ground public transport – a motley variety of almost 32,000 buses, micro-buses and vans – along its 13,000 kilometres of streets and highways.
Then there are the taxis –180,000 of them according to Armando Quintero, the city's Secretary of Transport and Roads – and the 3.5 million cars.
"The numbers are incredible," he admits. "It's hard to find anything similar anywhere else in the world."
In fact, during the morning rush hour, traffic on the two 12-lane freeways, the Periferico and the Interior Circuit, moves at an average of eight kilometres an hour, and 12 kilometres an hour everywhere else. Little wonder it can take people as long as three hours to travel to work or school.
What's more, "There are 350,000 new cars added to the traffic every year in the metropolitan zone," says Quintero, who calls this situation "the dictatorship of the vehicle."
The effect of them all is notorious: Mexico City has some of the worst air quality in the world. Most of the time my view of the urban valley isn't of buildings but rather a blanket of smog.
Yet when the Spanish conquistadors arrived here in 1521, they found an extraordinary community of some 300,000 people, living on an island surrounded by five lakes; the remnants of two are all that is left of them. Rivers and canals threaded the metropolis and canoes were the most common method of transport.
Even as late as 1856, one visitor described Mexico as "one of the most beautiful cities of the New World," enjoying a "healthy and temperate climate, and a sky of admirable purity and transparency."
"I knew this city as a city of trees, surrounded by large meadows and cornfields," says long-time public broadcaster Virgilio Caballero, 65. When he was a boy, the city had a population of less than 2 million.
"On my way to school, we children would pick cactus leaf, right in the neighbourhood, and lambs' quarters from the river banks, because the water was very clean."
Since the Spanish conquest, however, city authorities have made draining the valley a priority. In Caballero's lifetime, "16 rivers were cemented over so cars could use them," he says. "It was terrible, like something out of a horror film."
Today, the world's largest drainage system – 52 kilometres of massive drains and another 160 kilometres of secondary drains – flushes away rainwater and sewage into the Panuco River and, eventually, the Gulf of Mexico.
The city now gets its water from underground sources, using 36,000 litres per second; about a third of that is lost to leakages. As a consequence, the whole place is sinking at a rate of 10 centimetres a year.
Incredibly, city residents were only allowed to vote for mayor in 1997. Until then, the central government appointed a party stalwart to run things, often for political gain.
The new mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, is unafraid of change. While the previous mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, spent billions on a series of raised highways running on top of the existing ones, Ebrard plans to shell out similar quantities on public transport.
The idea, says Quintero, is to transform the transit system "so that it is no longer a poor system of transport for the poor."
Devised in 2005 by Mexico's Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Mario Molina, the dedicated lane for the Metrobuses will be lengthened to a total of 29 kilometres. Ebrard will construct nine more such corridors, which will move up to 1.7 million passengers a day.
Better yet, he is also putting the kibosh on the private-transport sector's rattletrap collection of microbuses. Overcrowded, unsafe and prone to clogging traffic as they trawl the streets for passengers, their owners are being forced to ditch them for larger buses that are obliged to stop at demarcated stops.
The 21,000 tonnes of garbage Mexico City produces every day will be turned into biogas energy in the next two years, while Caballero is working on a way to give the entire city wireless Internet access.
Some urban planners even envision bringing back the lakes.
"It's feasible, technically and economically," says architect Alberto Kalach, "so it's just a question of political will."
While he estimates that 10,000 hectares are available for flooding, "that land is invaded by an average of 30 families every day."
Yet even as Mexico City has spread like a giant amoeba into 35 municipalities in neighbouring states, it manages to celebrate its humanity in small ways.
Little boys still take homemade parachutes and watch them rise in the draft from the subway grills in the Zocalo. Families from the outlying districts take their children boating on the lake in Chapultepec Park. Even the poorest families throw lively parties in their small cement yards to celebrate life's milestones: the birth of a baby, third and 15th birthdays, weddings and anniversaries.
Amid the sprawling traffic and the daily blanket of smog, it remains, at heart, a city of trees, large meadows and cornfields.
