Following a few days in Mexico City, I’ve had the pleasure of staying a week in Bogota, Colombia. Bogota is both the federal capital and the capital of Cundinamarca state, and while it probably doesn’t yet figure as a world capital of culture or clout, it certainly is a thriving mega city of regional importance.

Because of its position straddling the Andes, Colombia is a country with every climate conceivable, it has snow covered alps, temperate savannah, dense jungle, dry desert, not to mention both tropical Caribbean and temperate-maritime Pacific coasts.

The city itself sits on broad plain high up on the middle finger of the three-branched Andes mountains, in fact at 2,700m it’s high enough to cause altitude sickness in some people. The altitude gives the nominally tropical city a very mild temperate climate, with clear skies, low humidity and temperatures that sit around the high teens and low twenties every day of the year. You could call it the city of eternal Spring.
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Bogota is big. At around 11.5 million people it is as populous as greater London, or all of New Zealand two and a half times over.

Bogota is also dense. The majority of inhabitants live in apartment towers, mid rise block or terraced house style developments. The north of the city has a very European feel, with four to six story apartments of brick or concrete on a grid of fairly narrow tree lined streets. If it weren’t for the language you could be in the Netherlands or Germany.

Curiously, the city is three sided. The original colonial centre was established on one edge of the plain at the foot of a great mountain range. It has since sprawled across the plain to the north, south and west, but not to the east on account of the mountains. This allows for one unique benefit: you can ride a cable car a further 400m up the mountain of Monseraté near downtown and take in the whole sprawling metropolis in a single vista, including the bizzare experience of standing on terra firma and looking down at the tops of fifty story skyscrapers in the commercial district far below. If the thin air doesn’t take your breath away, the view certainly will!

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Accordingly Bogota has basically two types of land use structure. A long, thin, but dense band of apartment towers runs for 40km north-south along the eastern edge of the plain, taking advantage of the Andes foothills to provide spectacular view back across the city. These buildings are accessed by a circuitous web of winding narrow switchback roads not too dissimilar to western Wellington. For the most part the wealthy live here in gated apartment communities, however dotted amongst them are university campuses (Bogota has dozens of them for some reason) and patches of impoverished and dangerous barrios similar to the famous favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

The other structure is on the plain itself, an enormous flat and regular grid of broad multi-lane avenues, filled with three to thirty storey buildings. Think Los Angeles but consistently taller. This is perhaps Bogota’s downfall: it land use is what can only be described as dense sprawl, and it’s transport system is entirely road based. Not surprisingly the traffic is truly horrendous. I have to laugh whenever people complain about Auckland’s supposedly worlds-worst traffic. Puh-lease. If you want bad traffic, take a city the same area as Auckland, with an entirely road based transport network… then add another ten million inhabitants all trying to drive at the same time.

Naturally Bogota has spend decades trying to accommodate it’s traffic with more, bigger roads. The city is covered in a massive amount of six, eight, ten lane avenues. They appear to have tried a bit of everything, separated motorways, limited access avenues, boulevards, frontage roads, slip lanes, underpasses, overpasses, one way streets, the works. The system almost works too… when conditions are perfect. However that almost never happens. It only takes one small crash, a truck parked illegally to unload, a taxi doing a u-turn or one of a thousand other small disruptions to infarct the system. This is perhaps the folly of huge roads for huge capacity, on an eight lane road one disruption clogs up eight times the traffic.

Transport here has an interesting socio-cultural element. From what I understand Bogotano society has six distinct classes with a broad spread of inequality, from the destitute poor up to the untouchable elite with money and connections above the law. For the middle classes, there is a great preoccupation with not sliding down the ladder. Few in the middle classes would ever dream of catching public transport as that is the domain of the underclass. Maintaining a private car is a necessary symbol of status regardless of the cost or the traffic, and if one does not drive they rely on cheap and ubiquitous taxis or town car services. Either way, not escape from the traffic is possible and it’s one form of private car all the way.

The transit wonks among us must now be thinking, but what about the Transmillennio? For the less frothy-mouthed readers, the Transmillennio is a now-famous busway system with half a dozen lines running along Bogota’s main arterials forming quite a wide reaching and effective network. This system is A grade busway of world class design. It is based around a system of dedicated, physically separated median busway lanes, some of which are grade separate at key intersections. The are combined with train-style island platform stations accessed by elaborate overpasses and footbridges. The busways themselves are serviced by special red colour high capacity trunk-only metro buses, very long vehicles with two or three articulated sections, high floors that match up with platform level, and four or even five double doors per bus. At the end of each of the busways there are huge interchanges where green-coloured feeder buses of conventional design connect the surrounding suburbs to the trunk busways. In that regard it really is metro system writ with rubber.

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So what is it like to use? I wouldn’t know myself, as I was consistently dissuaded from trying it by friends and family whenever I mentioned it. The locals advised it was too crowded, too dangerous, too much of a risk for any decent person to use. I do wonder if this is simply a hangover of the same cultural understanding that buses were for the poor and to be avoided. Indeed when I asked few of my advisors had ever set foot on the system. My one young cousin who did actually use it to get to university each day only complained that it was too crowded, and the station too far away from his apartment.

What we do know is that the system is indeed hugely popular and overcrowded, a victim of it’s own success. Preoccupations of class and status aside, hundreds of thousands of people use the system every day. For all its efficiency at beating traffic and it mega capacity buses ability to move the masses, the simple fact is it barely touches the sides of the transport task in Bogota. Imagine London with no tube, not overground, no suburban trains, no national rail, no DLR, no tramlink. Imagine a London with six busways as the only rapid transit. That is Bogota. They have a long way to go to turn the traffic situation around. So yes it is a massive success, and very worthwhile, but for Bogota it is just the start of fixing things.

So if the Transmillennio is so effective (if not comprehensive), one has to ask why we don’t build them in Auckland. Indeed we hear this quite often from certain politicians, why are we talking about CRL tunnels and trains and light rail, when the bus can do the job for half the price? It’s a good question, and one that deserves an evaluation. Nonetheless, the answer is pretty simple: space.

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The Transmillennio takes up space, lots of space. More space than we have. The basic cross section of these busways is two bus lanes either side of a median. That’s basically the full width of most of our main roads to start with. However, once you get to a stop the situation blows out again. Each of the stations has a large platform, then stopping lanes either side, then passing lane beside those again. That means a cross section of four bus lanes and the station, about 25 metres wide. Now as most of Auckland’s arterial roads are one chain wide (about 21m), building a Transmillennio in Auckland would require buying and demolishing all the buildings down one side of the street just to fit in the bus corridor, let alone any other traffic lanes, footpaths or street trees. Indeed, the one place we are looking at a multilane street busway, the AMETI corridor in east Auckland, they are planning to do exactly that.

So while we can do busways alongside motorways like we do on the North Shore (and hopefully the northwest), we can’t fit them in the street for the most part. This is why AT is looking at light rail, because for the same capacity LRT needs only two lanes and compact platforms, where the bus systems need four to manage the greater number of vehicles.

Bogota managed this by building into their existing avenues, which had huge wide medians in addition to three or four lanes in each direction. The Transmillennio got away without any land or building purchases by virtue of having huge road reserves to start with. In fact they had such wide corridors that they actually widened the roadways at the same time, adding extra lanes for traffic to offset the squeals of indignation about spending proper money on public transport. So in one way Bogota was lucky to have a fair whack of empty space effectively lying around, or arguably they were wasting land to start with and found a better use for it.

My end evaluation? The Transmillennio was a good move for Bogota that fits the city well and takes advantage of spatial resources, however it’s only the start of much more for fixing their transport issues.

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15 comments

  1. Interesting read. First shot looks a little different from Season 2 of “Narcos” that I am watching right now.

    Escobar blowing up all and sundry around 1992….

  2. I used the Transmilenio a lot when I was in Bogota earlier in the year. Off-peak I found that it was relatively easy to use, and not too crowded. It was also quite cheap and extended right out to the edge of the city, allowing me to visit one of the large malls out there. However, at peak, it was clear that the system struggled. The busses could only move through the stations so quickly, and this seemed to lead to a lot of reliability issues. I didn’t like the way the maps and routes were set out, but that might be because I’m used to the subway style system. I didn’t find it unsafe, and would encourage tourists to use it as long as they are cautious.

    I heard from some people that Penalosa has some personal financial interest in the system, and proposed it instead of a subway due to this. However, I think given the limited budget Bogota has, it was probably a good choice nonetheless.

    1. “However, at peak, it was clear that the system struggled. The busses could only move through the stations so quickly, and this seemed to lead to a lot of reliability issues.”

      I wonder if this has relevance to the debate that was going on a few days ago in one of the threads, regarding why BRT was not a better, more immediate, solution for Dom Rd than LRT

      1. Given that the peak hour passenger numbers on Transmilenio routes are literally an order of magnitude larger than what would be expected on Dominion Road any time within the next 15 years, no, there is no relevance at all.

    2. I also used Transmilenio, not quite a year ago. We only spent 1 night in Bogota and had a flight out next evening, so decided to try the system out to see how easy it would be to get to the airport later. Bought our smart-cards at the local ‘station’ (Note: no tagging-off required. A flat-fare admits you to the system and you can seemingly travel as much as you like once in it).

      We boarded the first, impressive-looking triple-articulated vehicle that came along in the direction of the airport. After a few Kms this terminated at a major interchange with buses everywhere, a mixture of BRT vehicles and regular buses coming and going from the streets. Were about about half-way to the airport and found it really difficult to work out from the mass of displayed information which was the bus to get. We ended up having to ask, but eventually found the correct bus, a single non-articulated vehicle, and made our trial-run to the airport.

      We then mistakenly assumed this same bus would take us back to our original station. Well it did (sort-of), shooting right past it non-stop! So we piled out at the next stop and caught another triple-artic back to where we started.

      Later in the day we returned with luggage to make the trip again, knowing what to do this time. But by now it was rush-hour and it was apparent that the rigid vehicles serving the airport were too small for the job. Finally we managed to elbow our way onto one!

      A regular 8-car metro serving the spinal route with local buses feeding the interchanges to my mind would have been much simpler to use and far superior.
      On the other hand, the impressive network of off-road cycleways and bike-parking facilities at the stations was a treat to behold!

      1. So I still think the ATAP use of the term Mass Transit over Rapid Transit for Auckland is curious. Rapid Transit more accurately describes what we have some of need [though of course it certainly could be more rapid- is this the point? An institutional fear of being accused of not delivering?].

  3. People have suggested we build a busway along arterial roads in Auckland with an order of magnitude higher capacity than would ever be required in the forseeable future? Weird.

  4. I was there a couple of years ago and I agree with you, the Transmilenio is functional, but it is merely a temporary measure, and famous for being packed tighter than a scrum. The city itself is incomparable with Auckland as it more than ten times the size, and living in an apartment is not contentious issue. The low rise areas, similar to the zoning in some areas of Auckland are definitely the nicer suburbs of Bogota, and hopefully we will see more, well designed (a real architect employed, not this Leuschke joke that seems intent on building eyesores and couldn’t design a small space if they were overpaid to do it NB I worked on Queens in Wakefield and was horrified by every aspect of the “design”), 4-6 level apartment (euro style) rising from the ashes of our leafy suburbia. I would recommend everyone to ride the Transmilenio, it makes JAFA public transport look positively heavenly!

    1. Yes unfortunately my family just don’t use it, and I had only a little time here with no real chance to get away myself. Furthermore with taxis only a couple of dollars per trip, a traveller getting around in a group of 2-4 people off peak will find it much more appealing to taxi.

  5. I was in Bogota 2 weeks ago but didn’t have time to use the pt. However I did use the metro and cablecars in Medellin. The metro is amazingly wide, I estimate half as wide again as London Undergound. It is a source of pride in that city and we were told people don’t eat or drink on it.

  6. Just a couple of days a go Presedent Santos and the Mayor Peñalosa confirmed the construction of the Bogata metro to start in 2018. Here is a link to the video in Español: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t-nhMnIh_Hs. This will certainly modernize the city’s transport system, but I don’t think it will help with the overcrowding of the system. That seems to be a real plague on all Latin countries and is certainly true of the Metro system in Medellin.

    On another note – It is defiantly worth being in Bogata on a Sunday! Cicolavia is a truly amazing event where they shut off 120km of road.

    Peñalosa seems to be doing some good things in Bogata. The city is definitely moving on from its coloured past and is becoming a real international city.

  7. I was in Bogota last month. I loved it as a city – the food was great, there were excellent provisions for cyclists, and the bus network was absolutely huge.

    I was excited to try out the TransMilenio, and found myself a little disappointed. Unless you’re super sure about your destination, it can be hard to figure out what the correct bus for you is.

    Also, while the experience is similar to Light Rail, it has all the drawbacks of a bus – if you’re standing, it’s not a particularly smooth ride.

    The TransMilenio is undoubtedly a great service, and a good thing for Bogota – but I found myself wishing they had a metro, or light rail lines.

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