Answer is not in Metro or BRT alone but multimodal system: Former Bogota mayor
On her visit to India, Lopez, the former Bogota mayor, who is now a 2024 ALI Fellow at Harvard University and advisor to the WRI, a global think tank, spoke with HT about the importance of strong city leadership. She highlighted initiatives made during her tenure
New Delhi: Bogota, the capital of Colombia, became a role model for public transport innovations, thanks to the shining success of its Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) since 2000 and the expansion of the city’s cycling infrastructure. However, as the BRTS started showing signs of decline and the road traffic worsened, the Colombian capital decided to build the Metro, ending decades of political vacillation since the network was proposed way back in 1942.
The construction of the first Metro line began in 2021 after Claudia Lopez became the first woman to be elected Bogota’s mayor. A former senator and a vice presidential candidate for the Green Alliance in Colombia’s presidential elections in 2018, Lopez insists that the solution for urban transit is not in the Metro or the BRT alone but in an integration of all means of mobility, including regional trains and cable cars, walking spaces, bike lanes, and green corridors.
On her visit to India, Lopez, who is a 2024 ALI Fellow at Harvard University and advisor to the World Resources Institute, a global think tank, spoke with HT about the importance of strong city leadership and the key initiatives made during her mayoral tenure (2020-23) — setting up a metropolitan region, decarbonising public buses, and building Care Blocks, a “social innovation” she is most proud of. Edited excerpts:
As the BRTS deteriorates, what are the new mobility challenges facing Bogota?
Our experience shows that TransMilenio, our BRT system, works well for up to 30,000 trips per day. Beyond that, a city needs the Metro.
As much as the BRT is a great achievement for Bogota, too much dependence on one mode of transportation was our failure. BRT users complain not because the system is bad but because it is doing way more than it was planned for. Some BRT lines in Bogota offer 44,000 trips per day, almost double what it was planned for. Because of that excess, it started losing quality.
That is the first lesson learned: Do not depend on your invention too much. So, we are now building the first Metro line and contracting the second. Unfortunately, this was a heavily politicised discussion, and we wasted a lot of time. But the citizens—that’s the good part of democracy—got fed up and supported the idea to build the Metro.
It is also very important for us to have electric cable cars, which can collect people from the mountains surrounding Bogota, where the popular neighbourhoods are, and bring them to the BRT or the Metro in 15 minutes instead of 40 or 60 minutes. Bogota had just one cable car, but we contracted another two during my administration.
The third element is the metropolitan train—the Regio Tram, as we call it. Bogota is a city surrounded by another 23 municipalities. Rapid public transportation (links) with those municipalities is crucial because, in its absence, people will use cars, causing pollution and congestion. We are building one Regio tram line and envisioning the second.
Our multimodal system will have the BRT, the Metro, cable cars, and regional trains. We will continue to expand our bicycle lane network. The fifth element that we are trying to upgrade is the space for pedestrians.
In Bogota, one out of four trips is made on foot, but pedestrians have the worst infrastructure. This is unfair because it’s the cheapest and the easiest to provide. Pedestrians are kids, elders, or women. They are also the users of public transport. Two out of three public transport users in Bogota are women. So, addressing this brings in the element of gender inclusiveness.
How much of Bogota’s achievement can be credited to the strong city leadership and administrative coordination?
Democratically elected and fiscally accountable local governments are essential to strong and sustainable socio-economic urban development. Bogota has benefited enormously from 40 years of Colombian municipal decentralisation but has also faced the challenges of a lack of coordination with its adjoining municipalities.
We need to coordinate with at least 28 municipalities because people live, work, and move around in conurbation. They do not care where the political-administrative boundaries are. So, we made an institutional innovation to build the metropolitan region.
Bogota has a special status as a capital district and governorship at the same time. Yet it is surrounded by and belongs to the state of Cundinamarca, which has 116 municipalities. They share with us water and energy and provide us with around half of the food we consume.
That is why we decided not to go for a metropolitan area, which is only for conurbation issues such as traffic, utilities, and housing. Instead, we chose a metropolitan region to address additional challenges such as environmental planning, water, energy, and food security, mobility, and economic development. It’s a tripartite governance between Bogota District Capital, the State of Cundinamarca, and its 116 municipalities.
Unlike Bogota, which is building the Metro after creating an extensive bus system, Indian cities that never had enough public buses are getting the more capital-intensive Metro.
This is a sort of false dilemma. Should we go for buses because they are cheaper, or should we go for the Metro because it is fancier? One should not fall into this. It should be a rational issue about what is feasible as a multimodal system.
What is your suggestion for Indian cities?
First, don’t try to build transportation systems based on localities. Plan region-wise and build multimodal transportation systems for those regions. Second, connect current and future sources (locations) of employment and housing.
If you think about it from the regional perspective, you should probably build either BRTS, Metros, or regional trains in places that are not obvious today but will be sustainable in the near future.
Multimodality, rather than mono-modality, and technical criteria, rather than political preferences, should inform such decisions. It is not the Metro or buses—it is the Metro and regional trains, buses, and bikes, and walkable spaces, and mixed lanes (to) build a secure, interconnected, inclusive multimodal mobility system.
In Bogota, we are now transforming the mobility infrastructure from the typical 20th-century car-driven avenues to the 21st-century green corridors. This involves giving space first to nature, then to pedestrians, who account for 24% of daily trips; then to bikes, which account for 8%; then to the massive electric public transportation, which is 50% (of the modal share), and then the mixed lanes.
What’s your take on the idea of a 15-minute city?
My friend Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has rightly promoted the idea, which is a reframing of the (American urbanist) Jane Jacob’s concept of a mixed, inclusive city. Bogota and many other cities in the developing world have the mixed-land uses that such an idea entails. Unfortunately, there is unequal urban segregation and limited public transportation.
As a result, Bogota, for example, is a 60-90-minute city. That is the time it takes for many of our citizens to go from home to work and home to study. Wasting three hours daily in traffic is highly unproductive from an economic, social, and urban point of view. It is hard to go from 90 to 15 minutes. But with the execution of our current plans in the next 15 years, we will go from 60-90 to a 30-minute city on average.
In Bogota, planning and executing means fixing because 80% of urbanisation has already happened. However, in India, which is 50% urbanised, there is still room for planning for the other 50%. You have the fantastic opportunity to do most of your urbanisation in the correct, sustainable, proximate, productive, and inclusive manner from the beginning.
Also, planning transportation on its own is useless. Plan for employment first because people go where they can make a living using whatever mode they have to. Employment and care location will determine housing, education, and leisure.
Like Bogota, many Indian cities are transitioning to electric buses. What are the lessons they can learn from your experience?
We have this fraternal competition with Santiago, Chile, now the first in Latin America regarding the electric fleet. Bogota is second. However, India has the largest electric fleet outside of China in Asia.
For Colombia, decarbonisation cannot be an industry that I can substitute because my entire demand is not enough to build a new industry. We are a country of 50 million. But India is on a different scale—large enough to build it as a new industry. It is not just about having an electric bus fleet but decarbonising the whole production chain.
To do the same, we will need to aggregate the demand of Latin America as a whole. But India accounts for three times the entire Latin American continent. For India, urbanisation is a demand industry, and decarbonisation is a supply industry. Your development strategy can be based on this.
The Care Block initiative was one of the highlights of your mayorship.
Around 1.2 million women, roughly 15% of our total population, are devoted to unpaid care work. They sacrifice their lives, their opportunities, their education, and their income autonomy to take care of the children, elders, and people with disabilities in their families. This unpaid care work accounts for 13% of Bogota’s and 21% of Colombia’s GDP.
One of my innovations was to create the Care Blocks, a collection of proximate social facilities and services that relieve women from the overburden of unpaid care work and reduce their poverty of time. This is done by taking care of their loved ones, teaching care-giving to other family members, and offering women a place for leisure, education, empowerment, and income generation.
Our mantra is that men can and should learn to care if they want their daughters to have a better life and you all (the family) to have a more happy, prosperous, and meaningful life. In our four-year term, we created 23 care blocks, which served around half a million women caregivers and members of their families, lifting them out of poverty of time and reducing the burden of unpaid care work.